Children whose father smoked at time of conception have 15% greater risk of developing leukaemia
This is almost certainly a social class effect. Smoking is correlated with all indices of social disadvantage and the poor are less healthy anyhow so it is most likely poverty rather tham smoking that creates the association with leukaemia
Children whose fathers smoke around the time of their conception have a 15 per cent higher risk of developing the most common form of childhood cancer, a type of leukemia, say researchers. The study credits a number of factors in children developing acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and follows others that have also found an increased risk.
'Study results suggest that heavier paternal smoking around the time of conception is a risk factor for childhood ALL,' wrote researchers led by Elizabeth Milne at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research in Australia. The findings were published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Although ALL is the most common childhood cancer, it is still rare, affecting about three to five children out of every 100,000. The researchers surveyed the families of nearly 300 children with ALL, asking about the smoking habits of both parents. They also compared these families to those of more than 800 children of similar ages who did not have leukemia.
The mothers' smoking behaviour had no impact on the children's risk of developing the cancer, but children whose fathers smoked at all around the time of their conception were 15 per cent more likely to develop leukemia. Those whose fathers smoked at least 20 cigarettes per day around that same time were 44 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with the disease.
Of nine earlier reports the researchers used in their comparison with the current study, six also found an increased risk.
'The importance of tobacco exposure and children's cancers has been overlooked until recently,' said Patricia Buffler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. She added that since tobacco is full of toxins, including carcinogens, it was possible that there could be damage in the cells that produce sperm.
Milne agreed, noting: 'Sperm containing DNA (damage) can still reach and fertilize an ovum, which may lead to disease in the offspring.'
But she added that the study did not prove that DNA damage in the sperm caused ALL in the children, since the disease was likely to be caused by a number of factors. Other environmental factors tied to a greater chance of developing childhood leukemia are ionizing radiation such as x-rays, and the mother's exposure to paint or pesticides while pregnant.
SOURCE
Iron supplements 'could help stave off DVT and other life-threatening blood clots'
This concerns people with one particular disease only. It may have no application to others
Iron supplements could be used to prevent deep vein thrombosis and other life-threatening blood clots, new research shows.
Each year, one in 1,000 people in Britain is affected by clots that form in the veins, and scientists now believe the risk could rise in those with a lack of iron. DVT is often associated with long distance air travel and other situations that involve being immobile for long periods of time.
Clots frequently form in the legs causing painful swelling and, in some cases, a danger that lumps of blood will dislodge and travel to the lungs with fatal results.
Researchers at Imperial College London studied 609 patients with blood vessel disease haemorrhagic telangiectasia, who have a higher risk of blood clots. They found that this increased risk disappeared when the HHT sufferers took iron supplements. Many of the patients had low iron levels, because of iron loss through excessive bleeding - a symptom of HHT.
The study, published in the journal Thorax, found that a blood-iron level of six micromoles per litre compared with the normal mid-range figure of 17 micromoles led to a 2.5-fold increase in venous thrombosis risk.
Lead researcher Dr Claire Shovlin, from the university's National Heart and Lung Institute, said: 'Our study shows that in people with HHT, low levels of iron in the blood is a potentially treatable risk factor for blood clots. 'There are small studies in the general population which would support these findings, but more studies are needed to confirm this. 'If the finding does apply to the general population, it would have important implications in almost every area of medicine.'
Iron deficiency anaemia is thought to affect at least one billion people worldwide. Its association with clotting may have been missed before because blood iron levels fluctuate during the day. Other markers of iron deficiency can go unnoticed if certain medical conditions are present.
The scientists said that obtaining reliable data depended on consistent timing of blood samples.
Low iron levels were associated with higher levels of Factor VIII, a blood protein which promotes normal clotting. This in turn was a strong risk factor for blood clots. Making the blood clot more easily after losing iron might be an evolutionary trick to aid survival, suggested Dr Shovlin.
She added: 'We can speculate that in evolutionary terms, it might be advantageous to promote blood clotting when your blood is low in iron, in order to prevent further blood loss'.
SOURCE
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Friday, December 16, 2011
Widowers 'need to find a new partner to stave off mental illness'
Or is it that the mentally unstable have more trouble finding a partner?
Finding love again after the death of a partner really can help heal a broken heart and stave off mental illness, scientists claim. New findings reveal that widowers who remain single for years after their partners’ death are more likely to succumb to mental illness.
Swedish researchers say that men who managed to find a new partner were more likely to move on and recover from their grief.
However, those who remained alone were at ‘far greater’ risk of conditions such as depression, anxiety or insomnia, and were also more likely to use anti-depressants or sleeping pills.
The study was the first of its kind to look at how losing a long-term partner affects men, with previous research on widows already establishing the increased risk of mental and physical illness among those who struggle to move on.
Researchers from the University of Gothenburg questioned almost 700 men who’d lost their wives to cancer.
Results showed that widowers who’d found a new partner four or five years after the death of their wives ‘managed to deal with their loss relatively well.’
Study author Professor Gunnar Steineck, whose work was supported by the Swedish Cancer Society, said: 'Previous studies have shown that people who lose their partner are at greater short-term poor mental health.
'Our study is the first to show that the risk of poor mental health last for many years but, on the average, the risk is restricted to those who don’t find a new partner.'
Asked if the results proved that ‘love heals’ he said: 'We need more research to understand the underlying mechanisms, but yes, emotional support from a new partner does probably help to process grief and protect against mental illness.
'But it could also be the case that those men who cope best with their loss are more likely to show an interest in finding a new partner.'
SOURCE
NTSB Recommends Useless National Ban on All Mobile Phone Use while Driving
The war on cellphones continues
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday called on all states to ban “the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers.” This was in response to a August 2010 three-collision accident in Missouri involving two school buses traveling in a convoy, a pickup, and a truck-tractor. The accident killed two people and injured 38. It went like this:
Collision 1: The pickup driver, who was engaging in a text-message conversation, rear-ended the truck-tractor after failing to notice that it had slowed or stopped.
Collision 2: The first school bus, whose driver was distracted by a passenger bus pulled over on the side of the road, then struck the pickup, killing the pickup driver.
Collision 3: The second school bus, following the first bus too closely, was unable to stop in time to avoid the collision, killing a high school student seated in the rear of the first bus.
There were multiple factors involved: the pickup driver was distracted by his cell phone, the pickup driver was fatigued, the first school bus driver was distracted by the other passenger bus on the side of the road, and the second school bus driver failed to follow at a safe distance. However, it was the inattention and unsafe behavior of the school bus drivers that ultimately resulted in fatalities, and these collisions involved external, rather than internal factors. It is worth noting that at the time of the accident, Missouri had a law on the books that banned texting while driving for drivers under 21. The texting driver of the pickup was 19 years old.
After studying the causes of the accident, NTSB issued a number of recommendations, one of which is garnering a significant amount of media attention: calling on the states to institute bans that would include texting while driving, use of a hand-held mobile phone while driving, and use of a hands-free mobile phone while driving.
Distracted driving is certainly a problem, although it is not responsible for as many fatalities and injuries as drunk driving, speeding, or aggressive driving [Figure 7]. But calling on states to institute bans on cell phone use will do little to reduce distracted-driving deaths. First, these bans are extremely difficult to enforce, particularly if the driver is using a hands-free device. Second, most distracted driving accidents are not caused by cell phone use. In fact, drivers distracted by conversations with passengers is a factor in far more crashes than cell phone use [Figure 1].
Obviously the NTSB isn’t going to call for bans on speaking in motor vehicles or isolating the driver from the rest of the cab with soundproofing technology. But there are plenty more potential internal distractions to worry about: watching your kids in the backseat through the rear-view mirror, reading a map, eating and drinking, smoking, grooming, adjusting the stereo, using a navigation device, adjusting climate controls, retrieving objects from seats or the floor, etc.
All of these internal distraction factors are primarily or partially responsible for some accidents. Rather than instituting bans on what drivers may or may not be doing inside their automobiles, licensing and testing authorities ought to be educating drivers on safe driving behaviors. Multitasking while driving naturally increases crash risk, but does anyone for a minute believe that prohibiting all multitasking (whatever that even means) would be enforceable or even beneficial?
But even if distraction bans could be enforced, they likely wouldn’t work. According to research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Highway Loss Data Institute, hardly a pro-distraction outfit, state bans on hand-held phone use while driving do not reduce crash risk [PDF] and state bans on texting while driving may actually increase crash risk [PDF]. “[C]learly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers’ eyes further from the road and for a longer time.”
The move by NTSB is clearly political and lacks any rational basis. Given their limitations and not wanting to appear useless, as is often the case for nanny state bureaucrats, they must do “something” — even if that “something” will fail to achieve what its backers claim. If states are serious about improving highway safety, they ought to ignore NTSB’s recommended bans and work on improving their driver education programs. NTSB’s handwaving is nothing more than a distraction from a very serious issue.
SOURCE
Or is it that the mentally unstable have more trouble finding a partner?
Finding love again after the death of a partner really can help heal a broken heart and stave off mental illness, scientists claim. New findings reveal that widowers who remain single for years after their partners’ death are more likely to succumb to mental illness.
Swedish researchers say that men who managed to find a new partner were more likely to move on and recover from their grief.
However, those who remained alone were at ‘far greater’ risk of conditions such as depression, anxiety or insomnia, and were also more likely to use anti-depressants or sleeping pills.
The study was the first of its kind to look at how losing a long-term partner affects men, with previous research on widows already establishing the increased risk of mental and physical illness among those who struggle to move on.
Researchers from the University of Gothenburg questioned almost 700 men who’d lost their wives to cancer.
Results showed that widowers who’d found a new partner four or five years after the death of their wives ‘managed to deal with their loss relatively well.’
Study author Professor Gunnar Steineck, whose work was supported by the Swedish Cancer Society, said: 'Previous studies have shown that people who lose their partner are at greater short-term poor mental health.
'Our study is the first to show that the risk of poor mental health last for many years but, on the average, the risk is restricted to those who don’t find a new partner.'
Asked if the results proved that ‘love heals’ he said: 'We need more research to understand the underlying mechanisms, but yes, emotional support from a new partner does probably help to process grief and protect against mental illness.
'But it could also be the case that those men who cope best with their loss are more likely to show an interest in finding a new partner.'
SOURCE
NTSB Recommends Useless National Ban on All Mobile Phone Use while Driving
The war on cellphones continues
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) yesterday called on all states to ban “the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices (other than those designed to support the driving task) for all drivers.” This was in response to a August 2010 three-collision accident in Missouri involving two school buses traveling in a convoy, a pickup, and a truck-tractor. The accident killed two people and injured 38. It went like this:
Collision 1: The pickup driver, who was engaging in a text-message conversation, rear-ended the truck-tractor after failing to notice that it had slowed or stopped.
Collision 2: The first school bus, whose driver was distracted by a passenger bus pulled over on the side of the road, then struck the pickup, killing the pickup driver.
Collision 3: The second school bus, following the first bus too closely, was unable to stop in time to avoid the collision, killing a high school student seated in the rear of the first bus.
There were multiple factors involved: the pickup driver was distracted by his cell phone, the pickup driver was fatigued, the first school bus driver was distracted by the other passenger bus on the side of the road, and the second school bus driver failed to follow at a safe distance. However, it was the inattention and unsafe behavior of the school bus drivers that ultimately resulted in fatalities, and these collisions involved external, rather than internal factors. It is worth noting that at the time of the accident, Missouri had a law on the books that banned texting while driving for drivers under 21. The texting driver of the pickup was 19 years old.
After studying the causes of the accident, NTSB issued a number of recommendations, one of which is garnering a significant amount of media attention: calling on the states to institute bans that would include texting while driving, use of a hand-held mobile phone while driving, and use of a hands-free mobile phone while driving.
Distracted driving is certainly a problem, although it is not responsible for as many fatalities and injuries as drunk driving, speeding, or aggressive driving [Figure 7]. But calling on states to institute bans on cell phone use will do little to reduce distracted-driving deaths. First, these bans are extremely difficult to enforce, particularly if the driver is using a hands-free device. Second, most distracted driving accidents are not caused by cell phone use. In fact, drivers distracted by conversations with passengers is a factor in far more crashes than cell phone use [Figure 1].
Obviously the NTSB isn’t going to call for bans on speaking in motor vehicles or isolating the driver from the rest of the cab with soundproofing technology. But there are plenty more potential internal distractions to worry about: watching your kids in the backseat through the rear-view mirror, reading a map, eating and drinking, smoking, grooming, adjusting the stereo, using a navigation device, adjusting climate controls, retrieving objects from seats or the floor, etc.
All of these internal distraction factors are primarily or partially responsible for some accidents. Rather than instituting bans on what drivers may or may not be doing inside their automobiles, licensing and testing authorities ought to be educating drivers on safe driving behaviors. Multitasking while driving naturally increases crash risk, but does anyone for a minute believe that prohibiting all multitasking (whatever that even means) would be enforceable or even beneficial?
But even if distraction bans could be enforced, they likely wouldn’t work. According to research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Highway Loss Data Institute, hardly a pro-distraction outfit, state bans on hand-held phone use while driving do not reduce crash risk [PDF] and state bans on texting while driving may actually increase crash risk [PDF]. “[C]learly drivers did respond to the bans somehow, and what they might have been doing was moving their phones down and out of sight when they texted, in recognition that what they were doing was illegal. This could exacerbate the risk of texting by taking drivers’ eyes further from the road and for a longer time.”
The move by NTSB is clearly political and lacks any rational basis. Given their limitations and not wanting to appear useless, as is often the case for nanny state bureaucrats, they must do “something” — even if that “something” will fail to achieve what its backers claim. If states are serious about improving highway safety, they ought to ignore NTSB’s recommended bans and work on improving their driver education programs. NTSB’s handwaving is nothing more than a distraction from a very serious issue.
SOURCE
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Paracetamol kills mother who took a 'few extra’ pills a day
I have been warning of the dangers of paracetamol for years so it is very sad to read this. She should have been encouraged to take a combination medicine like Di-Gesic -- as its smaller paracetamol content and greater efficacy make it much safer. So guess which one of those two is at present being banned around the world? It is Di-Gesic!
Desiree Phillips, a young mother who took “a few extra” paracetamol tablets to relieve the pain of a minor operation died after suffering irreversible liver damage.
The death of Desiree Phillips, 20, follows studies showing that “staggered overdoses” of paracetamol over the course of a few days can be more dangerous than a single, massive overdose.
Miss Phillips, of Llanelli, South Wales, had a routine procedure to remove several benign lumps on her breast earlier this year.
Doctors prescribed antibiotics and over-the-counter paracetamol to help her cope with the discomfort.
Nine days after the operation, she was taken to hospital in excruciating pain and diagnosed with liver failure. She underwent a liver transplant but died a week later at Birmingham Queen Elizabeth hospital.
Her father, Des, said he believed his daughter had been taking only “a few extra tablets” than the recommended dose of eight every 24 hours.
“She seemed fine to us, then out of the blue her boyfriend found her stretched out on the sofa and he rang an ambulance. The whole thing came as a terrible shock. When we heard she was in hospital we never expected that she might die.
“People don’t realise – they think an extra two won’t harm, that extra two over a period of time can harm your liver if you keep taking that over two to three weeks,” said Mr Phillips.
Last month research published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology found that taking just a few extra paracetamol tablets a day can be fatal. The study of 663 patients with paracetamol-induced liver injury found that those who took “staggered overdoses” over the course of several days were a third more likely to die than those who took a single overdose of pills.
Dr Kenneth Simpson, of the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, said: “Those who’ve taken a staggered overdose do worse, paradoxically, than the people who’ve tried to kill themselves.”
Although an inquest is yet to be held into Miss Phillips’s death, her family has spoken out in the hope of preventing similar tragedies.
Mr Phillips , a chef, said: “If a painkiller is that dangerous, it should be prescribed. You should not be able to buy them over the counter. Cigarettes have a label saying 'smoking kills’. Paracetamol can be fatal, but when you look at the packets, they don’t look dangerous.”
Miss Phillips’s one-year-old son, Jayden, is now being cared for by his father, Simon Dewi-Jones. Mr Phillips added: “It was awful, in the end she couldn’t even give him a cuddle goodbye. He’s too young to know what happened now, but I’m sure it will be something that affects him in the future.”
Miss Phillips’s mother, Ayshea, 38, said: “Desiree was taking painkillers because she had three lumps removed from her breast and she was in pain. She didn’t know what was going to happen. Jayden doesn’t deserve to be growing up without a mum because of this.”
A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said: “Paracetamol is a safe and effective painkiller for a range of conditions when used correctly and when the dosage recommendations are followed.”
SOURCE
Simple blood test could spot Alzheimer's five years before it kicks in
This is still very speculative
A simple blood test could spot Alzheimer’s at least five years before symptoms start to show. The test’s creator hopes it will be in widespread use within three years.
Quicker detection of the disease would allow earlier treatment and, with the help of new drugs, those who test positive may never fully develop it.
Those given early warnings could also take preventative measures, such as changing their diet and taking more exercise.
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia affect more than 800,000 Britons. The figure is set to double in a generation. Currently, sufferers are only diagnosed after the disease has already caused significant damage to the brain.
But the new test aims to detect signs of Alzheimer’s years earlier by distinguishing between mere forgetfulness and the more dangerous memory lapses that signal dementia in its earliest stages. Spotting Alzheimer’s early on would have ‘immense’ benefits for the elderly, the test’s inventor said last night.
Professor Matej Oresic made the breakthrough after analysing the blood of 226 men and women in their late sixties and seventies and then tracking their health for an average of five years.
At the start of the study, 37 had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; of the others, 46 did not have any memory problems but 143 were suffering from forgetfulness. By the end of the study, 52 of that 143 had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Comparing their blood samples with samples from those who were still merely forgetful revealed clear differences in the concentration of three metabolites – chemicals produced by reactions in the body.
Working out how these chemicals relate to the progression of Alzheimer’s could help develop new treatments for the disease. Testing for them in elderly people suffering from forgetfulness could lead to valuable early warnings of the onset of dementia, the journal Translational Psychiatry reports.
Those found to have memory problems related to Alzheimer’s could do mental and physical exercises and change their diet in an attempt to keep their brain healthy for as long as possible.
Professor Oresic, of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, said delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s in older people ‘is almost as good as preventing it’, adding: ‘A delay of even a couple of years would immensely improve quality of life.’
He said that more work is needed to show just how accurate his test is – but he hopes the kit will be in small-scale use within a year, and widely used in two or three.
Dr Simon Ridley, head of re- search for the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK, said Professor Oresic’s work had seen ‘promising early results’.
He added that the chemicals produced by the billions of reactions that occur in the body present a ‘gold-mine’ of potentially useful information for scientists.
If research on such chemicals leads to the development of drugs that can stop the progression of Alzheimer’s, those who receive an early positive on Professor Oresic’s test may never go on to fully develop the disease after all.
SOURCE
I have been warning of the dangers of paracetamol for years so it is very sad to read this. She should have been encouraged to take a combination medicine like Di-Gesic -- as its smaller paracetamol content and greater efficacy make it much safer. So guess which one of those two is at present being banned around the world? It is Di-Gesic!
Desiree Phillips, a young mother who took “a few extra” paracetamol tablets to relieve the pain of a minor operation died after suffering irreversible liver damage.
The death of Desiree Phillips, 20, follows studies showing that “staggered overdoses” of paracetamol over the course of a few days can be more dangerous than a single, massive overdose.
Miss Phillips, of Llanelli, South Wales, had a routine procedure to remove several benign lumps on her breast earlier this year.
Doctors prescribed antibiotics and over-the-counter paracetamol to help her cope with the discomfort.
Nine days after the operation, she was taken to hospital in excruciating pain and diagnosed with liver failure. She underwent a liver transplant but died a week later at Birmingham Queen Elizabeth hospital.
Her father, Des, said he believed his daughter had been taking only “a few extra tablets” than the recommended dose of eight every 24 hours.
“She seemed fine to us, then out of the blue her boyfriend found her stretched out on the sofa and he rang an ambulance. The whole thing came as a terrible shock. When we heard she was in hospital we never expected that she might die.
“People don’t realise – they think an extra two won’t harm, that extra two over a period of time can harm your liver if you keep taking that over two to three weeks,” said Mr Phillips.
Last month research published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology found that taking just a few extra paracetamol tablets a day can be fatal. The study of 663 patients with paracetamol-induced liver injury found that those who took “staggered overdoses” over the course of several days were a third more likely to die than those who took a single overdose of pills.
Dr Kenneth Simpson, of the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, said: “Those who’ve taken a staggered overdose do worse, paradoxically, than the people who’ve tried to kill themselves.”
Although an inquest is yet to be held into Miss Phillips’s death, her family has spoken out in the hope of preventing similar tragedies.
Mr Phillips , a chef, said: “If a painkiller is that dangerous, it should be prescribed. You should not be able to buy them over the counter. Cigarettes have a label saying 'smoking kills’. Paracetamol can be fatal, but when you look at the packets, they don’t look dangerous.”
Miss Phillips’s one-year-old son, Jayden, is now being cared for by his father, Simon Dewi-Jones. Mr Phillips added: “It was awful, in the end she couldn’t even give him a cuddle goodbye. He’s too young to know what happened now, but I’m sure it will be something that affects him in the future.”
Miss Phillips’s mother, Ayshea, 38, said: “Desiree was taking painkillers because she had three lumps removed from her breast and she was in pain. She didn’t know what was going to happen. Jayden doesn’t deserve to be growing up without a mum because of this.”
A spokesman for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said: “Paracetamol is a safe and effective painkiller for a range of conditions when used correctly and when the dosage recommendations are followed.”
SOURCE
Simple blood test could spot Alzheimer's five years before it kicks in
This is still very speculative
A simple blood test could spot Alzheimer’s at least five years before symptoms start to show. The test’s creator hopes it will be in widespread use within three years.
Quicker detection of the disease would allow earlier treatment and, with the help of new drugs, those who test positive may never fully develop it.
Those given early warnings could also take preventative measures, such as changing their diet and taking more exercise.
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia affect more than 800,000 Britons. The figure is set to double in a generation. Currently, sufferers are only diagnosed after the disease has already caused significant damage to the brain.
But the new test aims to detect signs of Alzheimer’s years earlier by distinguishing between mere forgetfulness and the more dangerous memory lapses that signal dementia in its earliest stages. Spotting Alzheimer’s early on would have ‘immense’ benefits for the elderly, the test’s inventor said last night.
Professor Matej Oresic made the breakthrough after analysing the blood of 226 men and women in their late sixties and seventies and then tracking their health for an average of five years.
At the start of the study, 37 had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; of the others, 46 did not have any memory problems but 143 were suffering from forgetfulness. By the end of the study, 52 of that 143 had also been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Comparing their blood samples with samples from those who were still merely forgetful revealed clear differences in the concentration of three metabolites – chemicals produced by reactions in the body.
Working out how these chemicals relate to the progression of Alzheimer’s could help develop new treatments for the disease. Testing for them in elderly people suffering from forgetfulness could lead to valuable early warnings of the onset of dementia, the journal Translational Psychiatry reports.
Those found to have memory problems related to Alzheimer’s could do mental and physical exercises and change their diet in an attempt to keep their brain healthy for as long as possible.
Professor Oresic, of the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, said delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s in older people ‘is almost as good as preventing it’, adding: ‘A delay of even a couple of years would immensely improve quality of life.’
He said that more work is needed to show just how accurate his test is – but he hopes the kit will be in small-scale use within a year, and widely used in two or three.
Dr Simon Ridley, head of re- search for the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK, said Professor Oresic’s work had seen ‘promising early results’.
He added that the chemicals produced by the billions of reactions that occur in the body present a ‘gold-mine’ of potentially useful information for scientists.
If research on such chemicals leads to the development of drugs that can stop the progression of Alzheimer’s, those who receive an early positive on Professor Oresic’s test may never go on to fully develop the disease after all.
SOURCE
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Statisticians can prove almost anything, a new study finds
The research flaws described below are well known in academe and I have made multiple references to some of them -- but it is good to see attention being drawn to them
Catchy headlines about the latest counter-intuitive discovery in human psychology have a special place in journalism, offering a quirky distraction from the horrors of war and crime, the tedium of politics and the drudgery of economics.
But even as readers smirk over the latest gee whizzery about human nature, it is generally assumed that behind the headlines, in the peer-reviewed pages of academia, most scientists are engaged in sober analysis of rigorously gathered data, and that this leads them reliably to the truth.
Not so, says a new report in the journal Psychological Science, which claims to show “how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.”
In “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant,” two scientists from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a colleague from Berkeley, argue that modern academic psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers that they can literally prove anything.
In effect turning the weapons of statistical analysis against their own side, the trio managed to to prove something demonstrably false, and thereby cast a wide shadow of doubt on any researcher who claims his findings are “statistically significant.”
In “many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not,” they write.
Defined as “the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis,” a false positive is “perhaps the most costly error” a scientist can make, they write, in part because they are “particularly persistent” in the literature.”
False positives also waste resources, and “inspire investment in fruitless research programs and can lead to ineffective policy changes.” Finally, they argue, a field known for publishing false positives risks losing its credibility.
Psychology, especially the branch of social psychology that merges with economics, is particularly sensitive to this criticism. It is a field in which reputations can be made with a single mention on the Freakonomics blog, and book deals signed based on single headlines.
One example of this trend is described in the December issue of The Atlantic magazine, in which David B. Klein, a libertarian economist at George Mason University in Virginia, retracts the claim he made last year in the Wall Street Journal, that left-wingers do not understand economics.
As quirky headlines go, it is hard to imagine a better one for the conservative Wall Street Journal than “Study Shows Left Wing Wrong About Economy” (In fact, the headline was “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” which Klein acknowledges carried the implication that left-wingers are not.)
Citing his own “myside bias,” otherwise known as confirmation bias, or the tendency to favour ideas that fit with one’s settled positions, Prof. Klein now admits that, according to the data he used, the ignorance he attributed to the left is also true of the right, and so the headline should have been less dramatic, something closer to “Nobody Understands Economics: Study.”
The problem, as Prof. Klein puts it, was the hidden bias in his own use of the data, and in the decisions he made about how to analyze it.
These decisions about data use are not usually made in advance of the research, based on rigid principles, according to the authors of the Psychological Science paper. Rather, they are dealt with as they arise, and it is common and accepted practice “to explore various analytical alternatives, to search for a combination that yields ‘statistical significance,’ and then to report only what ‘worked.’ ”
The authors — Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn — describe this flexibility as “researcher degrees of freedom,” and suggest that too much of it leads to bias at best, and nonsense at worst.
As a remedy, they offer a series of proposed guidelines for researchers and reviewers, but it was their somewhat cheeky experiment that brought the problem into the starkest relief.
As ever in social psychology, the experiment began with a room full of undergraduate guinea pigs, in this case paid for their attendance at a lab at the University of Pennsylvania. In the first of two separate trials, 30 students listened on headphones to one of two songs: either Kalimba, “an instrumental song by Mr. Scruff that comes free with the Windows 7 operating system,” or Hot Potato, performed by the children’s band The Wiggles.
Afterwards, they were asked to fill out a survey including the question, “How old do you feel right now: very young, young, neither young nor old, old, or very old.” They were also asked their father’s age, which allowed the researchers to control for variation in baseline age across participants.
Using a common statistical tool known as analysis of covariance, or ANCOVA, which measures one set of numbers against another, the authors were able to show that, on average, listening to the children’s song made people feel older than listening to the control song.
A second experiment aimed to extend these results with a song about getting old, When I’m Sixty-Four, by the Beatles, with Kalimba again as the control song. But this time, instead of being asked how old they felt, they were asked for their actual birthdate, which allowed precise calculation of their age.
An ANCOVA analysis, controlling for their father’s age, showed a statistically significant but logically impossible effect: listening to When I’m Sixty-Four made people 16 months younger than listening to Kalimba.
Listening to a song obviously has no bearing on how old you actually are. This nonsensical result, they argue, was merely an artifact of flawed analysis within a scientific culture that permits all kinds of relevant details to be excluded from the final publication.
Under their proposed guidelines, though not under current accepted scientific practices, the authors would have been required to disclose that they in fact asked participants many other questions, and did not decide in advance when to stop collecting data, which can skew results. They also would have been obliged to disclose that, without controlling for father’s age, there was no significant effect, and the experiment was more or less a bust.
“Our goal as scientists is not to publish as many articles as we can, but to discover and disseminate truth,” they write. “We should embrace these [proposed rules about disclosing research methods] as if the credibility of our profession depended on them. Because it does.”
SOURCE
Report: Studies overstated cellphone crash risk. Maybe no added risk at all
Another battle in the war on cellphones. Everything popular must be BAD!
So-called "distracted driving" has become a big public health issue in recent years. The majority of U.S. states now ban texting behind the wheel, while a handful prohibit drivers from using handheld cellphones at all (though many more ban "novice" drivers from doing so).
But studies have reached different conclusions about how much of an added crash risk there is with cellphone use.
In the new report, Richard A. Young of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit finds that two influential studies on the subject might have overestimated the risk.
The problem has to do with the studies' methods, according to Young. Both studies a 1997 study from Canada, and one done in Australia in 2005 were "case-crossover" studies.
The researchers recruited people who had been in a crash, and then used their billing records to compare their cellphone use around the time of the crash with their cell use during the same time period the week before (called a "control window").
But the issue with that, Young writes in the journal Epidemiology, is that people may not have been driving during that entire control window.
Such "part-time" driving, he says, would necessarily cut the odds of having a crash (and possibly reduce people's cell use) during the control window and make it seem like cellphone use is a bigger crash risk than it is.
The two studies in question asked people whether they had been driving during the control windows, but they did not account for part-time driving, Young says.
So for his study, Young used GPS data to track day-to-day driving consistency for 439 drivers over 100 days. He grouped the days into pairs: day one was akin to the "control" days used in the earlier studies, and day two was akin to the "crash" day.
Overall, Young found, there was little consistency between the two days when it came to driving time.
When he looked at all control windows where a person did some driving, the total amount of time on the road was about one-fourth of what it was during the person's "crash" day.
If that information were applied to the two earlier studies, Young estimates, the crash risk tied to cellphone use would have been statistically insignificant.
That's far lower than the studies' original conclusions: that cellphone use while driving raises the risk of crashing four-fold.
And, Young says, the results might help explain why some other studies have not linked cell use to an increased crash risk.
A researcher not involved in the work said that the two earlier studies may well have overstated the crash risk from using a cellphone.
But that doesn't mean you should feel free to chat and text away at the wheel, according to Fernando Wilson, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
A number of other studies, using designs other than case-crossover, have suggested that cellphone use, and particularly texting, is hazardous on the road, Wilson told Reuters Health.
"In wider policy, I don't think this study is going to change the conversation about distracted driving," Wilson said. "Most of the conventional thinking is that we need to do something to reduce it."
In his own study published last year, Wilson looked at information from a government database that tracks deaths on U.S. public roads. He found that after declining between 1999 and 2005, deaths blamed on distracted driving rose 28 percent between 2005 and 2008.
And the increase seemed to be related to a sharp rise in texting. ("Distracted driving" refers to anything that takes the driver's attention off the road, from fiddling with the radio to talking to other people in the car.)
Other studies, Wilson noted, have used mounted cameras to show that drivers' behavior becomes more risky when they are using cellphones.
All of those studies have limitations, and cannot pinpoint just how big a risk driving-while-texting (or talking) might be. Wilson said the current study highlights a limitation in case-crossover studies.
But the new study, itself, has shortcomings. Applying the GPS findings from this study to the two earlier ones, done with different drivers, in different countries, is tricky, both Young and Wilson point out. "It's possible that the (earlier) study findings were overstated," Wilson said, "but it's difficult to know by how much."
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 450,000 Americans were injured in crashes linked to distracted driving in 2009. Another 5,500 were killed.
SOURCE
The research flaws described below are well known in academe and I have made multiple references to some of them -- but it is good to see attention being drawn to them
Catchy headlines about the latest counter-intuitive discovery in human psychology have a special place in journalism, offering a quirky distraction from the horrors of war and crime, the tedium of politics and the drudgery of economics.
But even as readers smirk over the latest gee whizzery about human nature, it is generally assumed that behind the headlines, in the peer-reviewed pages of academia, most scientists are engaged in sober analysis of rigorously gathered data, and that this leads them reliably to the truth.
Not so, says a new report in the journal Psychological Science, which claims to show “how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis.”
In “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant,” two scientists from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and a colleague from Berkeley, argue that modern academic psychologists have so much flexibility with numbers that they can literally prove anything.
In effect turning the weapons of statistical analysis against their own side, the trio managed to to prove something demonstrably false, and thereby cast a wide shadow of doubt on any researcher who claims his findings are “statistically significant.”
In “many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not,” they write.
Defined as “the incorrect rejection of a null hypothesis,” a false positive is “perhaps the most costly error” a scientist can make, they write, in part because they are “particularly persistent” in the literature.”
False positives also waste resources, and “inspire investment in fruitless research programs and can lead to ineffective policy changes.” Finally, they argue, a field known for publishing false positives risks losing its credibility.
Psychology, especially the branch of social psychology that merges with economics, is particularly sensitive to this criticism. It is a field in which reputations can be made with a single mention on the Freakonomics blog, and book deals signed based on single headlines.
One example of this trend is described in the December issue of The Atlantic magazine, in which David B. Klein, a libertarian economist at George Mason University in Virginia, retracts the claim he made last year in the Wall Street Journal, that left-wingers do not understand economics.
As quirky headlines go, it is hard to imagine a better one for the conservative Wall Street Journal than “Study Shows Left Wing Wrong About Economy” (In fact, the headline was “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” which Klein acknowledges carried the implication that left-wingers are not.)
Citing his own “myside bias,” otherwise known as confirmation bias, or the tendency to favour ideas that fit with one’s settled positions, Prof. Klein now admits that, according to the data he used, the ignorance he attributed to the left is also true of the right, and so the headline should have been less dramatic, something closer to “Nobody Understands Economics: Study.”
The problem, as Prof. Klein puts it, was the hidden bias in his own use of the data, and in the decisions he made about how to analyze it.
These decisions about data use are not usually made in advance of the research, based on rigid principles, according to the authors of the Psychological Science paper. Rather, they are dealt with as they arise, and it is common and accepted practice “to explore various analytical alternatives, to search for a combination that yields ‘statistical significance,’ and then to report only what ‘worked.’ ”
The authors — Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson and Uri Simonsohn — describe this flexibility as “researcher degrees of freedom,” and suggest that too much of it leads to bias at best, and nonsense at worst.
As a remedy, they offer a series of proposed guidelines for researchers and reviewers, but it was their somewhat cheeky experiment that brought the problem into the starkest relief.
As ever in social psychology, the experiment began with a room full of undergraduate guinea pigs, in this case paid for their attendance at a lab at the University of Pennsylvania. In the first of two separate trials, 30 students listened on headphones to one of two songs: either Kalimba, “an instrumental song by Mr. Scruff that comes free with the Windows 7 operating system,” or Hot Potato, performed by the children’s band The Wiggles.
Afterwards, they were asked to fill out a survey including the question, “How old do you feel right now: very young, young, neither young nor old, old, or very old.” They were also asked their father’s age, which allowed the researchers to control for variation in baseline age across participants.
Using a common statistical tool known as analysis of covariance, or ANCOVA, which measures one set of numbers against another, the authors were able to show that, on average, listening to the children’s song made people feel older than listening to the control song.
A second experiment aimed to extend these results with a song about getting old, When I’m Sixty-Four, by the Beatles, with Kalimba again as the control song. But this time, instead of being asked how old they felt, they were asked for their actual birthdate, which allowed precise calculation of their age.
An ANCOVA analysis, controlling for their father’s age, showed a statistically significant but logically impossible effect: listening to When I’m Sixty-Four made people 16 months younger than listening to Kalimba.
Listening to a song obviously has no bearing on how old you actually are. This nonsensical result, they argue, was merely an artifact of flawed analysis within a scientific culture that permits all kinds of relevant details to be excluded from the final publication.
Under their proposed guidelines, though not under current accepted scientific practices, the authors would have been required to disclose that they in fact asked participants many other questions, and did not decide in advance when to stop collecting data, which can skew results. They also would have been obliged to disclose that, without controlling for father’s age, there was no significant effect, and the experiment was more or less a bust.
“Our goal as scientists is not to publish as many articles as we can, but to discover and disseminate truth,” they write. “We should embrace these [proposed rules about disclosing research methods] as if the credibility of our profession depended on them. Because it does.”
SOURCE
Report: Studies overstated cellphone crash risk. Maybe no added risk at all
Another battle in the war on cellphones. Everything popular must be BAD!
So-called "distracted driving" has become a big public health issue in recent years. The majority of U.S. states now ban texting behind the wheel, while a handful prohibit drivers from using handheld cellphones at all (though many more ban "novice" drivers from doing so).
But studies have reached different conclusions about how much of an added crash risk there is with cellphone use.
In the new report, Richard A. Young of Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit finds that two influential studies on the subject might have overestimated the risk.
The problem has to do with the studies' methods, according to Young. Both studies a 1997 study from Canada, and one done in Australia in 2005 were "case-crossover" studies.
The researchers recruited people who had been in a crash, and then used their billing records to compare their cellphone use around the time of the crash with their cell use during the same time period the week before (called a "control window").
But the issue with that, Young writes in the journal Epidemiology, is that people may not have been driving during that entire control window.
Such "part-time" driving, he says, would necessarily cut the odds of having a crash (and possibly reduce people's cell use) during the control window and make it seem like cellphone use is a bigger crash risk than it is.
The two studies in question asked people whether they had been driving during the control windows, but they did not account for part-time driving, Young says.
So for his study, Young used GPS data to track day-to-day driving consistency for 439 drivers over 100 days. He grouped the days into pairs: day one was akin to the "control" days used in the earlier studies, and day two was akin to the "crash" day.
Overall, Young found, there was little consistency between the two days when it came to driving time.
When he looked at all control windows where a person did some driving, the total amount of time on the road was about one-fourth of what it was during the person's "crash" day.
If that information were applied to the two earlier studies, Young estimates, the crash risk tied to cellphone use would have been statistically insignificant.
That's far lower than the studies' original conclusions: that cellphone use while driving raises the risk of crashing four-fold.
And, Young says, the results might help explain why some other studies have not linked cell use to an increased crash risk.
A researcher not involved in the work said that the two earlier studies may well have overstated the crash risk from using a cellphone.
But that doesn't mean you should feel free to chat and text away at the wheel, according to Fernando Wilson, an assistant professor at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.
A number of other studies, using designs other than case-crossover, have suggested that cellphone use, and particularly texting, is hazardous on the road, Wilson told Reuters Health.
"In wider policy, I don't think this study is going to change the conversation about distracted driving," Wilson said. "Most of the conventional thinking is that we need to do something to reduce it."
In his own study published last year, Wilson looked at information from a government database that tracks deaths on U.S. public roads. He found that after declining between 1999 and 2005, deaths blamed on distracted driving rose 28 percent between 2005 and 2008.
And the increase seemed to be related to a sharp rise in texting. ("Distracted driving" refers to anything that takes the driver's attention off the road, from fiddling with the radio to talking to other people in the car.)
Other studies, Wilson noted, have used mounted cameras to show that drivers' behavior becomes more risky when they are using cellphones.
All of those studies have limitations, and cannot pinpoint just how big a risk driving-while-texting (or talking) might be. Wilson said the current study highlights a limitation in case-crossover studies.
But the new study, itself, has shortcomings. Applying the GPS findings from this study to the two earlier ones, done with different drivers, in different countries, is tricky, both Young and Wilson point out. "It's possible that the (earlier) study findings were overstated," Wilson said, "but it's difficult to know by how much."
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 450,000 Americans were injured in crashes linked to distracted driving in 2009. Another 5,500 were killed.
SOURCE
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
New super vaccine could tackle 70% of lethal cancers and is better than 'wonder drug' Herceptin
Bright eyed hopes like this tend not to survive the test of time but you never know. When even effective drugs that have been in common use for decades eventually end up banned, pessimism would seem in order
A vaccine that could deal a serious blow to seven in ten lethal cancers has been developed by scientists.
In tests, it shrunk breast tumours by 80 per cent, and researchers believe it could also tackle prostate, pancreatic, bowel and ovarian cancers.
Even tumours that resist treatment with the best medicines on the market, including the ‘wonder drug’ Herceptin, may be susceptible to the vaccine.
The experiments done so far have been on mice, but researchers hope to pilot the drug on people within two years. If all goes well, the vaccine – one of the first to combat cancer – could be on the market by 2020.
More than 300,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed in Britain each year and the disease kills around half this number annually.
Rather than attacking cancer cells, like many drugs, the new treatment harnesses the power of the immune system to fight tumours.
The search for cancer vaccines has until now been hampered by fears that healthy tissue would be destroyed with tumours. To get round this, researchers from the University of Georgia and the Mayo Clinic in the United States focused on a protein called MUC1 that is made in bigger amounts in cancerous cells than in healthy ones. Not only is there more of it, but a sugar that it is ‘decorated’ with has a distinctive shape.
The vaccine ‘trains’ the immune system to recognise the rogue sugar and turn its arsenal against the cancer.
Researcher Professor Sandra Gendler said: ‘Cancer cells have a special way of thwarting the immune system by putting sugars on the surface of tumour cells so they can travel around the body without being detected. ‘To enable the immune system to recognise the sugar, it took a special vaccine that had three parts to it. ‘That turned out to be a winning combination.’
Her co-author Professor Geert-Jan Boons said: ‘This vaccine elicits a very strong immune response. ‘It activates all three components of the immune system to reduce tumour size by an average of 80 per cent.’
The misshaped MUC1 sugar is found in 90 per cent of breast and pancreatic cancers and around 60 per cent of prostate cancers, as well as many other tumours. The researchers believe more than 70 per cent of all cancers that kill may be susceptible to the vaccine.
Despite their excitement, the work is still only at an early stage. After the ‘dramatic’ results of the tests on mice with breast tumours, the researchers now plan to try the drug on human cancer cells in a dish.
Years of large-scale human trials would need to follow before the drug was judged safe and effective for widespread use in hospitals. It could then be used with existing drugs to boost treatment and given to prevent tumours from coming back after surgery.
Men and women known to be at high risk of cancer because of their genes could also be vaccinated in an attempt to stop tumours from appearing.
Dr Boons, who has founded a biotech company to commercialise the vaccine, said: ‘We are beginning to have therapies that can teach our immune system to fight what is uniquely found in cancer cells. ‘When combined with early diagnosis, the hope is that one day cancer will become a manageable disease.’
The drug is one of several treatments in the pipeline that work by triggering the immune system to attack and kill cancer cells.
Dr Caitlin Palframan, of Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: ‘This exciting new approach could lead to treatments for breast cancer patients who have few options. ‘It also opens up the possibility of vaccinating high-risk women against breast cancer in the future. ‘However, we need to see this approach trialled in cancer patients before we know its full potential.’
Oliver Childs, of Cancer Research UK, said: ‘These researchers are not alone in trying to harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer – it’s a key area of research interest around the world.
‘This study is interesting, but a long way from a vaccine for cancer patients at the moment. ‘The next step is to see if this work can be repeated in human cells in the lab and then in larger trials with patients.’
SOURCE
Steve Jobs a victim of homeopathy, says expert
ALTERNATIVE medicine is unethical, criminal and likely contributed to the death of Apple boss Steve Jobs, visiting professor Edzard Ernst says. The world's first professor of complementary medicine was in Adelaide yesterday to speak at the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association conference at UniSA.
Famous for causing an uproar when, in July, he labelled Prince Charles a "snake oil salesman" for his dandelion and detox remedy, Prof Ernst yesterday spoke of the dangers of unproven complementary medicine.
"They mislead people to the point of being quite dangerous, all of this is idiotic rubbish," he said, calling for more rigorous testing of claims. "Australia is one of the highest user groups globally. About 50 per cent of the general population use some form of complementary medicine."
While he supports evidence-based complementary medicines such as St John's wort, Prof Ernst took aim at homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, Bach flower remedies and magnetic therapies.
He said the plethora of misinformation about homeopathy - which treats "like with like" through the dilution of elements - had contributed to deaths, likely including that of Mr Jobs, who died from pancreatic cancer in October.
In his biography of the Apple founder, Walter Isaacson details Jobs' regrets that he turned to alternative therapies when first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. “I didn’t want my body to be opened…I didn’t want to be violated in that way,” Jobs told Isaacson.
Prof Ernst said too many people were similarly relying on "unproven treatments" for fatal diseases. "Homeopathy is totally under-investigated," he said. "Look at Steve Jobs' cancer death, which is totally tragic."
The problem, he said, was the "monstrous" amount of available misinformation and a lack of regulation and clinical testing. "They should be tested in exactly the same way which we test any other treatment," he said. "There's only one science and there is no alternative to science."
Professor Ernst said claims that these therapies worked, made without proof, were "irresponsible and criminal". He said the science did support specific therapies which were backed by evidence, such as St John's wort.
The professor was this year forced into an early retirement from Exeter University, where he set up the Complementary Medicine and Rehabilitation Department in 1993, after an earlier stoush with the Prince over a confidential report.
SOURCE
Bright eyed hopes like this tend not to survive the test of time but you never know. When even effective drugs that have been in common use for decades eventually end up banned, pessimism would seem in order
A vaccine that could deal a serious blow to seven in ten lethal cancers has been developed by scientists.
In tests, it shrunk breast tumours by 80 per cent, and researchers believe it could also tackle prostate, pancreatic, bowel and ovarian cancers.
Even tumours that resist treatment with the best medicines on the market, including the ‘wonder drug’ Herceptin, may be susceptible to the vaccine.
The experiments done so far have been on mice, but researchers hope to pilot the drug on people within two years. If all goes well, the vaccine – one of the first to combat cancer – could be on the market by 2020.
More than 300,000 cases of cancer are diagnosed in Britain each year and the disease kills around half this number annually.
Rather than attacking cancer cells, like many drugs, the new treatment harnesses the power of the immune system to fight tumours.
The search for cancer vaccines has until now been hampered by fears that healthy tissue would be destroyed with tumours. To get round this, researchers from the University of Georgia and the Mayo Clinic in the United States focused on a protein called MUC1 that is made in bigger amounts in cancerous cells than in healthy ones. Not only is there more of it, but a sugar that it is ‘decorated’ with has a distinctive shape.
The vaccine ‘trains’ the immune system to recognise the rogue sugar and turn its arsenal against the cancer.
Researcher Professor Sandra Gendler said: ‘Cancer cells have a special way of thwarting the immune system by putting sugars on the surface of tumour cells so they can travel around the body without being detected. ‘To enable the immune system to recognise the sugar, it took a special vaccine that had three parts to it. ‘That turned out to be a winning combination.’
Her co-author Professor Geert-Jan Boons said: ‘This vaccine elicits a very strong immune response. ‘It activates all three components of the immune system to reduce tumour size by an average of 80 per cent.’
The misshaped MUC1 sugar is found in 90 per cent of breast and pancreatic cancers and around 60 per cent of prostate cancers, as well as many other tumours. The researchers believe more than 70 per cent of all cancers that kill may be susceptible to the vaccine.
Despite their excitement, the work is still only at an early stage. After the ‘dramatic’ results of the tests on mice with breast tumours, the researchers now plan to try the drug on human cancer cells in a dish.
Years of large-scale human trials would need to follow before the drug was judged safe and effective for widespread use in hospitals. It could then be used with existing drugs to boost treatment and given to prevent tumours from coming back after surgery.
Men and women known to be at high risk of cancer because of their genes could also be vaccinated in an attempt to stop tumours from appearing.
Dr Boons, who has founded a biotech company to commercialise the vaccine, said: ‘We are beginning to have therapies that can teach our immune system to fight what is uniquely found in cancer cells. ‘When combined with early diagnosis, the hope is that one day cancer will become a manageable disease.’
The drug is one of several treatments in the pipeline that work by triggering the immune system to attack and kill cancer cells.
Dr Caitlin Palframan, of Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: ‘This exciting new approach could lead to treatments for breast cancer patients who have few options. ‘It also opens up the possibility of vaccinating high-risk women against breast cancer in the future. ‘However, we need to see this approach trialled in cancer patients before we know its full potential.’
Oliver Childs, of Cancer Research UK, said: ‘These researchers are not alone in trying to harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer – it’s a key area of research interest around the world.
‘This study is interesting, but a long way from a vaccine for cancer patients at the moment. ‘The next step is to see if this work can be repeated in human cells in the lab and then in larger trials with patients.’
SOURCE
Steve Jobs a victim of homeopathy, says expert
ALTERNATIVE medicine is unethical, criminal and likely contributed to the death of Apple boss Steve Jobs, visiting professor Edzard Ernst says. The world's first professor of complementary medicine was in Adelaide yesterday to speak at the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association conference at UniSA.
Famous for causing an uproar when, in July, he labelled Prince Charles a "snake oil salesman" for his dandelion and detox remedy, Prof Ernst yesterday spoke of the dangers of unproven complementary medicine.
"They mislead people to the point of being quite dangerous, all of this is idiotic rubbish," he said, calling for more rigorous testing of claims. "Australia is one of the highest user groups globally. About 50 per cent of the general population use some form of complementary medicine."
While he supports evidence-based complementary medicines such as St John's wort, Prof Ernst took aim at homeopathy, aromatherapy, herbal remedies, Bach flower remedies and magnetic therapies.
He said the plethora of misinformation about homeopathy - which treats "like with like" through the dilution of elements - had contributed to deaths, likely including that of Mr Jobs, who died from pancreatic cancer in October.
In his biography of the Apple founder, Walter Isaacson details Jobs' regrets that he turned to alternative therapies when first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003. “I didn’t want my body to be opened…I didn’t want to be violated in that way,” Jobs told Isaacson.
Prof Ernst said too many people were similarly relying on "unproven treatments" for fatal diseases. "Homeopathy is totally under-investigated," he said. "Look at Steve Jobs' cancer death, which is totally tragic."
The problem, he said, was the "monstrous" amount of available misinformation and a lack of regulation and clinical testing. "They should be tested in exactly the same way which we test any other treatment," he said. "There's only one science and there is no alternative to science."
Professor Ernst said claims that these therapies worked, made without proof, were "irresponsible and criminal". He said the science did support specific therapies which were backed by evidence, such as St John's wort.
The professor was this year forced into an early retirement from Exeter University, where he set up the Complementary Medicine and Rehabilitation Department in 1993, after an earlier stoush with the Prince over a confidential report.
SOURCE
Monday, December 12, 2011
The 'detox delusion': Health claims 'at best unfounded and at worst dangerous', argues professor
They promise to help you shed weight and purge your body of chemicals that are poisoning your body and mind. But the only thing that detox products will help you lose is money, a scientist said last night.
From diets based on raw fruit and vegetables, to foot spas and colonic hydrotherapy, there are dozens of treatments and products that claim to boost health by cleansing the body of chemicals.
Marketing is likely to become particularly fierce in the next few weeks, as millions who over-indulge during the Christmas period make New Year’s resolutions to be healthier.
But detox diets and other treatments are not the answer, an expert has warned. David Bender, an emeritus professor of nutritional biochemistry, said the body is perfectly capable of detoxing itself without any extra help. What is more, he says the claims made about detoxing are at best unfounded and more likely undeniably false. Some detox methods may even be dangerous, he claims.
In an article written in Society of Biology magazine The Biologist, he argues that the term detox has gone from being applied to a chemical reaction involved in the production of urine, to ‘a meaningless marketing term’. His piece, entitled The Detox Delusion, picks apart the claims made by those promoting detox diets.
Such diets usually involve eating large amounts of fruit, vegetables and juices, while drinking large amounts of water and steering clear of caffeine, sugar and alcohol.
They purport to boost health in a variety of ways, from raising energy levels to allowing the body to focus on self-healing. Professor Bender, of University College, London, writes: ‘I am not sure what “self-healing” is and the idea of “raised energy levels” is nonsense.
‘The whole philosophy of detox is based on the unlikely premise that accumulated toxins cause a sluggish metabolism, weight gain, general malaise and so on. ‘Weight gain is due to an imbalance between food consumption and energy expenditure. There is no magic shortcut for weight loss – you have to eat less and exercise more. It’s that simple.’
SOURCE
Gene therapy on course to claim a first
Sounds promising but at a very preliminary stage
MEDICAL researchers have successfully treated six patients suffering from the blood-clotting disease known as haemophilia B by injecting them with the correct form of a defective gene.
Haemophilia B is the first well-known disease to appear treatable by gene therapy.
The general concept of gene therapy - replacing the defective gene in any genetic disease with the intact version - has long been alluring. But carrying it out in practice, usually by loading the replacement gene onto a virus that introduces it into human cells, has been a struggle.
The immune system is all too effective at killing the viruses before the genes can take effect.
The success with haemophilia B, reported online in The New England Journal of Medicine, embodies several minor improvements.
Haemophilia B is caused by a defect in the gene for factor IX and is fatal if untreated.
Patients were treated by infusing the delivery virus into their veins. The virus homes in on the cells of the liver, and the gene it carries then churns out correct copies of factor IX.
Four of the six patients could stop the usual treatment, injections of factor IX concentrate prepared from donated blood.
Treating a patient with concentrate costs $300,000 a year but the single required injection of the new delivery virus costs $30,000.
The disease occurs almost only in men because the factor IX gene lies on the X chromosome, of which men have a single copy.
Women who carry a defective gene on one X chromosome can compensate with the good copy on their other X chromosome, but they bequeath the defective copy to half their children.
SOURCE
They promise to help you shed weight and purge your body of chemicals that are poisoning your body and mind. But the only thing that detox products will help you lose is money, a scientist said last night.
From diets based on raw fruit and vegetables, to foot spas and colonic hydrotherapy, there are dozens of treatments and products that claim to boost health by cleansing the body of chemicals.
Marketing is likely to become particularly fierce in the next few weeks, as millions who over-indulge during the Christmas period make New Year’s resolutions to be healthier.
But detox diets and other treatments are not the answer, an expert has warned. David Bender, an emeritus professor of nutritional biochemistry, said the body is perfectly capable of detoxing itself without any extra help. What is more, he says the claims made about detoxing are at best unfounded and more likely undeniably false. Some detox methods may even be dangerous, he claims.
In an article written in Society of Biology magazine The Biologist, he argues that the term detox has gone from being applied to a chemical reaction involved in the production of urine, to ‘a meaningless marketing term’. His piece, entitled The Detox Delusion, picks apart the claims made by those promoting detox diets.
Such diets usually involve eating large amounts of fruit, vegetables and juices, while drinking large amounts of water and steering clear of caffeine, sugar and alcohol.
They purport to boost health in a variety of ways, from raising energy levels to allowing the body to focus on self-healing. Professor Bender, of University College, London, writes: ‘I am not sure what “self-healing” is and the idea of “raised energy levels” is nonsense.
‘The whole philosophy of detox is based on the unlikely premise that accumulated toxins cause a sluggish metabolism, weight gain, general malaise and so on. ‘Weight gain is due to an imbalance between food consumption and energy expenditure. There is no magic shortcut for weight loss – you have to eat less and exercise more. It’s that simple.’
SOURCE
Gene therapy on course to claim a first
Sounds promising but at a very preliminary stage
MEDICAL researchers have successfully treated six patients suffering from the blood-clotting disease known as haemophilia B by injecting them with the correct form of a defective gene.
Haemophilia B is the first well-known disease to appear treatable by gene therapy.
The general concept of gene therapy - replacing the defective gene in any genetic disease with the intact version - has long been alluring. But carrying it out in practice, usually by loading the replacement gene onto a virus that introduces it into human cells, has been a struggle.
The immune system is all too effective at killing the viruses before the genes can take effect.
The success with haemophilia B, reported online in The New England Journal of Medicine, embodies several minor improvements.
Haemophilia B is caused by a defect in the gene for factor IX and is fatal if untreated.
Patients were treated by infusing the delivery virus into their veins. The virus homes in on the cells of the liver, and the gene it carries then churns out correct copies of factor IX.
Four of the six patients could stop the usual treatment, injections of factor IX concentrate prepared from donated blood.
Treating a patient with concentrate costs $300,000 a year but the single required injection of the new delivery virus costs $30,000.
The disease occurs almost only in men because the factor IX gene lies on the X chromosome, of which men have a single copy.
Women who carry a defective gene on one X chromosome can compensate with the good copy on their other X chromosome, but they bequeath the defective copy to half their children.
SOURCE
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Two-day diet could reduce breast cancer risk
This is pure speculation. The diet does seem to be one way to achieve weight loss but there is NO data on its effect on cancer incidence
Contrary to the usual assertions, some big studies show that fat women get LESS breast cancer. See the links in the sidebar here
Women can lower their risk of breast cancer by 40 per cent by following a two-day ‘life saver diet’ it has been claimed.
Two-day diet could reduce breast cancer risk
Researchers at the University Hospital in South Manchester are claiming that observing a strict two-day diet, rather than trying to constantly cut calories, is a more effective way to loose weight.
The study, lead by Dr Michelle Harvie, and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, found that women who followed a diet for just two days of the week lost more weight than those practising a full-time diet.
The researchers put 100 overweight female volunteers on one of three diets. The first diet consisted of consuming just 650 calories a day for several days of the week, with carbohydrates such as potatoes and bread cut out. For the remaining five days of the week the participants, whilst encouraged to eat healthily, could consumer whatever they liked.
Although volunteers on the second diet were also banned from eating carbohydrates for two days in a week, they were not set a specific calorie limit.
They were also allowed to eat as much as they wanted for the remainder of the week. The third and final group followed a more conventional diet, which included avoiding high-fat foods, alcohol and sticking to approximately 1,500 calories every day.
The results of the study showed that after three months the women on the two day diets had lost an average of nine pounds, compared to five pounds of those on the full-time diet.
Volunteers who had followed the two day diet had lost nearly twice the amount of weight of those on the more traditional full-time diet, and recorded significant improvements in three key areas linked to breast cancer. Their levels of hormone leptin dropped by 40 per cent.
Research professor Gillian Haddock, who also took part in the study herself, has said she would recommend the diet to friends and that she found it an easier diet option.
Mrs Haddock said: "I used to follow the 650-calorie diet on a Monday and Tuesday and it was great because I knew that by Wednesday I would be eating normally.
"It really suited me, I did it on my busiest work days and I would mainly have the milky drinks while I was at work so I didn't have to worry about shopping or taking in a specially prepared packed lunch."
The research, conducted at the Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention Centre at UHSM, was published in the International Journal of Obesity.
Pamela Goldberg, chief executive of the Breast Cancer Campaign said: "There are many breast cancer risk factors that can't be controlled, such as age, gender and family history - but staying at a healthy weight is one positive step that can be taken.
"This intermittent dieting approach provides an alternative to conventional dieting which could help with weight loss, but also potentially reduce the risk of developing breast cancer."
SOURCE
The scent of a man? It could be an STD, say scientists
Sounds reasonable
Women wondering whether or not to take the next step with a new man in their life should heed the advice of Russian scientists - and take a deep whiff.
Sniffing a potential partner’s scent could tell if Mr Right has a sexually transmitted disease, according to a new study.
The research found that gonorrhea-infected men smelt 'putrid' to women, reports MSNBC.com.
'Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odor attractiveness in humans' wrote Mikhail Moshkin, a professor at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Russia, and the lead author of research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The off-putting scent may be subtle, more a chemical warning than a stench of body odor, but it does have some effect, according to the experiment conducted by Moshkin and his colleagues.
The researchers had already observed that certain animals, such as mice and rats, were not as attracted to the scents of those that were infected with disease, reports MSNBC.com.
They investigated if humans would also be turned off by the scent of an infected person, particularly one with an STD.
The researchers took samples of armpit sweat and spit from 34 Russian men aged between 17 and 25. The group included 13 young men with gonorrhea, 16 who were healthy and five who had had the disease but were successfully treated.
Then 18 female students aged 17 to 20 were asked to sniff the samples.
They obtained sweat samples by dressing the men in tight-fitting T-shirts with cotton pads sewn into the armpits. After an hour of sweating, men bagged their shirts and the pads were placed in glass vials for the women to sniff.
The women ranked the infected men less than half as high as healthy or recovered guys on a 'pleasantness score' that assessed scent. And when they were asked to describe the scent, the women said that nearly 50 percent of the infected men’s sweat smelt 'putrid'.
The researchers said the study indicates that humans, like other animals, might use scent to sniff out appropriate mates.
'We can conclude that unpleasant body odor of infected persons can reduce the probability of a dangerous partnership,' the scientists say in the MSNBC.com report.
SOURCE
This is pure speculation. The diet does seem to be one way to achieve weight loss but there is NO data on its effect on cancer incidence
Contrary to the usual assertions, some big studies show that fat women get LESS breast cancer. See the links in the sidebar here
Women can lower their risk of breast cancer by 40 per cent by following a two-day ‘life saver diet’ it has been claimed.
Two-day diet could reduce breast cancer risk
Researchers at the University Hospital in South Manchester are claiming that observing a strict two-day diet, rather than trying to constantly cut calories, is a more effective way to loose weight.
The study, lead by Dr Michelle Harvie, and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, found that women who followed a diet for just two days of the week lost more weight than those practising a full-time diet.
The researchers put 100 overweight female volunteers on one of three diets. The first diet consisted of consuming just 650 calories a day for several days of the week, with carbohydrates such as potatoes and bread cut out. For the remaining five days of the week the participants, whilst encouraged to eat healthily, could consumer whatever they liked.
Although volunteers on the second diet were also banned from eating carbohydrates for two days in a week, they were not set a specific calorie limit.
They were also allowed to eat as much as they wanted for the remainder of the week. The third and final group followed a more conventional diet, which included avoiding high-fat foods, alcohol and sticking to approximately 1,500 calories every day.
The results of the study showed that after three months the women on the two day diets had lost an average of nine pounds, compared to five pounds of those on the full-time diet.
Volunteers who had followed the two day diet had lost nearly twice the amount of weight of those on the more traditional full-time diet, and recorded significant improvements in three key areas linked to breast cancer. Their levels of hormone leptin dropped by 40 per cent.
Research professor Gillian Haddock, who also took part in the study herself, has said she would recommend the diet to friends and that she found it an easier diet option.
Mrs Haddock said: "I used to follow the 650-calorie diet on a Monday and Tuesday and it was great because I knew that by Wednesday I would be eating normally.
"It really suited me, I did it on my busiest work days and I would mainly have the milky drinks while I was at work so I didn't have to worry about shopping or taking in a specially prepared packed lunch."
The research, conducted at the Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention Centre at UHSM, was published in the International Journal of Obesity.
Pamela Goldberg, chief executive of the Breast Cancer Campaign said: "There are many breast cancer risk factors that can't be controlled, such as age, gender and family history - but staying at a healthy weight is one positive step that can be taken.
"This intermittent dieting approach provides an alternative to conventional dieting which could help with weight loss, but also potentially reduce the risk of developing breast cancer."
SOURCE
The scent of a man? It could be an STD, say scientists
Sounds reasonable
Women wondering whether or not to take the next step with a new man in their life should heed the advice of Russian scientists - and take a deep whiff.
Sniffing a potential partner’s scent could tell if Mr Right has a sexually transmitted disease, according to a new study.
The research found that gonorrhea-infected men smelt 'putrid' to women, reports MSNBC.com.
'Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odor attractiveness in humans' wrote Mikhail Moshkin, a professor at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Russia, and the lead author of research published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
The off-putting scent may be subtle, more a chemical warning than a stench of body odor, but it does have some effect, according to the experiment conducted by Moshkin and his colleagues.
The researchers had already observed that certain animals, such as mice and rats, were not as attracted to the scents of those that were infected with disease, reports MSNBC.com.
They investigated if humans would also be turned off by the scent of an infected person, particularly one with an STD.
The researchers took samples of armpit sweat and spit from 34 Russian men aged between 17 and 25. The group included 13 young men with gonorrhea, 16 who were healthy and five who had had the disease but were successfully treated.
Then 18 female students aged 17 to 20 were asked to sniff the samples.
They obtained sweat samples by dressing the men in tight-fitting T-shirts with cotton pads sewn into the armpits. After an hour of sweating, men bagged their shirts and the pads were placed in glass vials for the women to sniff.
The women ranked the infected men less than half as high as healthy or recovered guys on a 'pleasantness score' that assessed scent. And when they were asked to describe the scent, the women said that nearly 50 percent of the infected men’s sweat smelt 'putrid'.
The researchers said the study indicates that humans, like other animals, might use scent to sniff out appropriate mates.
'We can conclude that unpleasant body odor of infected persons can reduce the probability of a dangerous partnership,' the scientists say in the MSNBC.com report.
SOURCE
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Diabetes risk of two takeaways in a week (and women are more in danger)
The finding below is almost certainly a social class effect. Many middle class people "wouldn't be seen dead" in McDonalds whereas working class people tend to appreciate its good value. The fact that the McDonald's munchers were also fatter also suggests that it is the characteristics of working class people that are showing up here, not the effects of diet. That poorer people have worse health is one of the most replicated findings in epidemiology
Two takeaways a week are enough to increase the risk of diabetes and heart disease, research shows. Young adults were more likely to have hidden health problems if they treated themselves to fast food on a twice-weekly basis, the study found.
Additionally, women appear to be more susceptible to the dangers. They had more warning signs, such as high blood sugar levels and increased insulin than men.
The results suggest many young professionals who are too busy to cook may be setting themselves up for serious health problems. Diabetes affects an estimated 2.5million Britons. Around 10 per cent of cases are due to type one, which is thought to be caused by a faulty immune system.
The remaining 90 per cent are type two, which is closely linked to unhealthy diet and lifestyle. The condition occurs when the body loses its ability to make use of glucose, a type of sugar that is released when we eat.
As levels rise, circulation suffers and blood vessels can be damaged. Left untreated, type two diabetes can raise the risk of heart attacks, blindness and amputation.
Researchers from the University of Tasmania and two other Australian science institutions studied the diet and lifestyles of 1,896 men and women aged 26 to 36. Almost 40 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women ate a takeaway twice a week or more.
The volunteers underwent a range of medical checks, including tests for glucose and insulin levels. High levels of both mean the body is heading for type two diabetes.
Researchers found women who had takeaways twice or more a week had significantly higher blood sugar levels than those who ate them once a week or less. They also had higher insulin and scored much higher on a test for signs of becoming resistant to the hormone – a warning sign of diabetes. Although men in the study also showed damage, the effects were much less severe.
Researchers said it was hard to tell if it was the fast food or excess weight caused by poor diet and lack of exercise that caused the problems.
They added: ‘It is unclear whether the differences [between one takeaway a week and two] are clinically significant. But they may represent an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes.’
The survey was published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In 2008, a Which? study found a single Indian takeaway contained 23.2 grammes of saturated fat – more than a woman’s entire daily allowance.
SOURCE
Cherry juice helps you to sleep?
It could bve true but it's a very tiny study for a very short time period
Two glasses of cherry juice can help you sleep nearly 40 minutes longer, research shows.
People who drank two glasses of tart cherry juice also napped less often in the day and had increased ‘sleep efficiency’ – the ratio of time spent in bed to time spent sleeping. They slept an average of 39 minutes longer.
Researchers found that Montmorency cherry juice – a variety of sour cherry – significantly increases the body’s level of melatonin, a powerful antioxidant that is critical in regulating sleep.
The 20 participants were given two 30ml servings of the juice diluted with half a pint of water, or an alternative fruit drink, for seven days – once when they woke up and another before bed.
The researchers at Northumbria University, whose findings were published in the European Journal of Nutrition, then tracked their sleep habits using actigraphs – watches that sense movement – and sleep diaries.
They found that healthy adults who had two daily glasses of the juice had longer sleep time, less daytime napping and up to a 6 per cent increase in sleep efficiency.
Researcher Jason Ellis said: ‘When darkness falls, the body produces melatonin to signal it is time to sleep. The juice provides an additional service to what we already have to strengthen the internal signal of the body clock.
‘It would definitely be beneficial to people with jet lag or coming off shift work – anywhere your internal clock has been fighting the external world.’
SOURCE
The finding below is almost certainly a social class effect. Many middle class people "wouldn't be seen dead" in McDonalds whereas working class people tend to appreciate its good value. The fact that the McDonald's munchers were also fatter also suggests that it is the characteristics of working class people that are showing up here, not the effects of diet. That poorer people have worse health is one of the most replicated findings in epidemiology
Two takeaways a week are enough to increase the risk of diabetes and heart disease, research shows. Young adults were more likely to have hidden health problems if they treated themselves to fast food on a twice-weekly basis, the study found.
Additionally, women appear to be more susceptible to the dangers. They had more warning signs, such as high blood sugar levels and increased insulin than men.
The results suggest many young professionals who are too busy to cook may be setting themselves up for serious health problems. Diabetes affects an estimated 2.5million Britons. Around 10 per cent of cases are due to type one, which is thought to be caused by a faulty immune system.
The remaining 90 per cent are type two, which is closely linked to unhealthy diet and lifestyle. The condition occurs when the body loses its ability to make use of glucose, a type of sugar that is released when we eat.
As levels rise, circulation suffers and blood vessels can be damaged. Left untreated, type two diabetes can raise the risk of heart attacks, blindness and amputation.
Researchers from the University of Tasmania and two other Australian science institutions studied the diet and lifestyles of 1,896 men and women aged 26 to 36. Almost 40 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women ate a takeaway twice a week or more.
The volunteers underwent a range of medical checks, including tests for glucose and insulin levels. High levels of both mean the body is heading for type two diabetes.
Researchers found women who had takeaways twice or more a week had significantly higher blood sugar levels than those who ate them once a week or less. They also had higher insulin and scored much higher on a test for signs of becoming resistant to the hormone – a warning sign of diabetes. Although men in the study also showed damage, the effects were much less severe.
Researchers said it was hard to tell if it was the fast food or excess weight caused by poor diet and lack of exercise that caused the problems.
They added: ‘It is unclear whether the differences [between one takeaway a week and two] are clinically significant. But they may represent an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes.’
The survey was published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In 2008, a Which? study found a single Indian takeaway contained 23.2 grammes of saturated fat – more than a woman’s entire daily allowance.
SOURCE
Cherry juice helps you to sleep?
It could bve true but it's a very tiny study for a very short time period
Two glasses of cherry juice can help you sleep nearly 40 minutes longer, research shows.
People who drank two glasses of tart cherry juice also napped less often in the day and had increased ‘sleep efficiency’ – the ratio of time spent in bed to time spent sleeping. They slept an average of 39 minutes longer.
Researchers found that Montmorency cherry juice – a variety of sour cherry – significantly increases the body’s level of melatonin, a powerful antioxidant that is critical in regulating sleep.
The 20 participants were given two 30ml servings of the juice diluted with half a pint of water, or an alternative fruit drink, for seven days – once when they woke up and another before bed.
The researchers at Northumbria University, whose findings were published in the European Journal of Nutrition, then tracked their sleep habits using actigraphs – watches that sense movement – and sleep diaries.
They found that healthy adults who had two daily glasses of the juice had longer sleep time, less daytime napping and up to a 6 per cent increase in sleep efficiency.
Researcher Jason Ellis said: ‘When darkness falls, the body produces melatonin to signal it is time to sleep. The juice provides an additional service to what we already have to strengthen the internal signal of the body clock.
‘It would definitely be beneficial to people with jet lag or coming off shift work – anywhere your internal clock has been fighting the external world.’
SOURCE
Friday, December 9, 2011
Drugs reduce stroke risk in patients with above average blood pressure (?)
This is a prime example of the medication madness that doctors blame on drug companies but which is in fact thoroughly iatrogenic -- originating from the doctors themselves. Doctors like writing prescriptions for magic bullets.
By definition, half the population is above average so if the proposal is to dose up people whose blood pressure is above average, that amounts to a call to put half the population on blood pressure drugs. The drug companies will no doubt be rubbing their hands with glee at such folly but everybody else should need a lot of convincing.
There has already been over the years a substantial lowering of the blood pressure level that is regarded as dangerous and this would appear to be the next step in that direction
The study was a meta-analysis so is hard to evaluate (I know from knowledge of my own research field that meta-analyses sometimes leave out stuff that doesn't suit the author) but for what it is worth, we read in the journal article that "To prevent 1 stroke, 169 patients had to be treated with a blood-pressure-lowering medication for an average of 4.3 years" -- so benefit from the medication was rare
Blood pressure medication could lower the risk of stroke in people whose readings are above average without being considered dangerously high, according to research.
Patients with hypertension, or chronic high blood pressure, are often given drugs to lower their risk of heart disease and stroke but the medication could also benefit a wider group of patients.
Researchers found that people with prehypertension, where blood pressure is higher than normal but not as severe as in hypertension, had a 22 per cent lower risk of stroke if they took the drugs.
An analysis of 16 studies, covering 70,664 patients, found that treating 169 prehypertensive people with blood pressure-lowering medication for 4.3 years would prevent one stroke from happening.
High blood pressure is the biggest risk factor for stroke, and an estimated 40 per cent of strokes could be prevented if people took steps to control their blood pressure levels.
US data shows that about 10 per cent of Americans have prehypertension, with a blood pressure between 120/80mm Hg and 139/89mm Hg – higher than the upper boundary of "normal" but below the lower limit of hypertension.
Ilke Sipahi of the Harrington-McLaughlin Heart and Vascular Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, who led the study, published in the Stroke journal, said patients would be better off trying to lower their blood pressure through a healthy diet and physical activity than by taking pills.
He said: "We do not think that giving blood pressure medicine instead of implementing the lifestyle changes is the way to go ... however, the clear-cut reduction in the risk of stroke with blood pressure pills is important and may be complementary to lifestyle changes."
Dr Sharlin Ahmed of The Stroke Association said: “Making a few simple lifestyle choices, such as eating a healthy diet low in salt, giving up smoking, and exercising regularly can help to keep your blood pressure under control and can reduce your risk of stroke.
"As highlighted in this study, it may also be beneficial for some people with borderline high blood pressure to take blood pressure lowering medication, however this needs to be discussed with your GP.”
SOURCE
Unhealthy lifestyle responsible for 'half of cancers' (?)
Prof. Parkin is an industrious little blighter. He has taken seventeen supposed risk factors one by one and done a meta-analysis of the effects of each one. So he has a total of seventeen journal articles in the one issue of the British Journal of Cancer.
His industry did not however seem to include any critical thought. His conclusions are simply reinforcement of the conventional wisdom and he pays no heed to the elementary truth that correlation is not causation -- preferring to rely instead on the speculations of epidemiologists. He even makes significant use of heavily criticized analyses from the sensationalist WCRF -- e.g. here. Some of his conclusions may be correct but we have no means of knowing which they are. Many of the factors he identified could well in fact be social class effects
Almost half of cancers are caused by an unhealthy lifestyle that could be avoided by quitting smoking, losing weight, exercising and drinking less alcohol, the most comprehensive study of its kind has found.
Around 134,000 cancers each year are the result of a poor lifestyle, Cancer Research UK has found.
In the most wide reaching study yet conducted into the issue, it was found that 14 different lifestyle factors ranging from smoking, to lack of exercise, eating too much salt, not having babies, drinking too much and being overweight contributed to four in every ten cancers diagnosed in the UK.
The findings expose the myth that developing cancer is 'bad luck' or down to your genes, the researchers said.
Previous studies had suggested around 80,000 cancers a year could be prevented but they did not take into account occupational exposures to things like asbestos, infections that can cause cancer and sunburn as the latest research has.
In a complex set of research studies, scientists calculated how many cancers and of what type could be attributed to each of the 14 lifestyle factors. The findings were published in the British Journal of Cancer.
Smoking was the biggest factor, causing nearly one in five of all cancers.
But Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said most people would not know that a quarter of all breast cancer cases could be prevented along with half of colorectal cancers.
He added: "Leading a healthy lifestyle doesn't guarantee that someone will not get cancer but doing so will significantly stack the odds in your favour."
Dr Kumar said tackling unhealthy lifestyle factors linked to cancer would also reduce the risk of a host of other killer diseases such as heart disease, respiratory problems, kidney disease and others.
Professor Max Parkin, a Cancer Research UK epidemiologist based at Queen Mary, University of London, and study author, said: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get it.
“Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that around 40 per cent of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change. “We didn’t expect to find that eating fruit and vegetables would prove to be so important in protecting men against cancer. And among women we didn’t expect being overweight to have a greater effect than alcohol."
The study found that alcohol was responsible for 6.4 per cent of breast cancers and almost one in ten liver cancers.
Three quarters of stomach cancers could be avoided, mostly by not smoking, eating too much salt and consuming more fruit and vegetables.
Red meat consumption led to 2.7 per cent of cancers, almost 8,500 cases. Obesity was linked to more than five per cent of cancers or almost 18000 cases, including a third of womb cancers.
Lack of breastfeeding was linked to 3.1 per cent of breast cancers and 17 per cent of ovarian cancers.
The study did not examine how many cancer deaths would be prevented with a healthier lifestyle.
Sara Hiom, director of information at Cancer Research UK, said: “We know, especially during the Christmas party season, that it is hard to watch what you eat and limit alcohol and we don’t want people to feel guilty about having a drink or indulging a bit more than usual. But it’s very important for people to understand that long term changes to their lifestyles can really reduce their cancer risk.”
The World Cancer Research Fund did a similar exercise in 2007 coming up with recommendations to individuals on how to reduce their cancer risk by eating less red meat, taking more exercise and staying slim.
Dr Rachel Thompson, Deputy Head of Science for World Cancer Research Fund, said: "This adds to the now overwhelmingly strong evidence that our cancer risk is affected by our lifestyles.
"We hope this new study helps to raise awareness of the fact that cancer is not simply a question of fate and that people can make changes today that can reduce their risk of developing cancer in the future."
Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: "No one chooses to have cancer and it would be wrong to blame people for making wrong lifestyle choices.
"For a long time, people have been told that eating healthily, not smoking and exercising regularly can benefit them, and these figures show again the impact a healthy lifestyle can have. Yet these healthy lifestyle messages are clearly not reaching enough people. They also need to be made more relatable to people’s everyday lives.
"There needs to be a cultural change, so that people see physical activity as an integral part of their lives, not just a optional add-on.”
Public Health Minister Anne Milton said: "We all know that around 23,000 cases of lung cancer could be stopped each year in England if people didn't smoke.
"By making small changes we can cut our risk of serious health problems - give up smoking, watch what you drink, get more exercise and keep an eye on your weight."
SOURCE
This is a prime example of the medication madness that doctors blame on drug companies but which is in fact thoroughly iatrogenic -- originating from the doctors themselves. Doctors like writing prescriptions for magic bullets.
By definition, half the population is above average so if the proposal is to dose up people whose blood pressure is above average, that amounts to a call to put half the population on blood pressure drugs. The drug companies will no doubt be rubbing their hands with glee at such folly but everybody else should need a lot of convincing.
There has already been over the years a substantial lowering of the blood pressure level that is regarded as dangerous and this would appear to be the next step in that direction
The study was a meta-analysis so is hard to evaluate (I know from knowledge of my own research field that meta-analyses sometimes leave out stuff that doesn't suit the author) but for what it is worth, we read in the journal article that "To prevent 1 stroke, 169 patients had to be treated with a blood-pressure-lowering medication for an average of 4.3 years" -- so benefit from the medication was rare
Blood pressure medication could lower the risk of stroke in people whose readings are above average without being considered dangerously high, according to research.
Patients with hypertension, or chronic high blood pressure, are often given drugs to lower their risk of heart disease and stroke but the medication could also benefit a wider group of patients.
Researchers found that people with prehypertension, where blood pressure is higher than normal but not as severe as in hypertension, had a 22 per cent lower risk of stroke if they took the drugs.
An analysis of 16 studies, covering 70,664 patients, found that treating 169 prehypertensive people with blood pressure-lowering medication for 4.3 years would prevent one stroke from happening.
High blood pressure is the biggest risk factor for stroke, and an estimated 40 per cent of strokes could be prevented if people took steps to control their blood pressure levels.
US data shows that about 10 per cent of Americans have prehypertension, with a blood pressure between 120/80mm Hg and 139/89mm Hg – higher than the upper boundary of "normal" but below the lower limit of hypertension.
Ilke Sipahi of the Harrington-McLaughlin Heart and Vascular Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, who led the study, published in the Stroke journal, said patients would be better off trying to lower their blood pressure through a healthy diet and physical activity than by taking pills.
He said: "We do not think that giving blood pressure medicine instead of implementing the lifestyle changes is the way to go ... however, the clear-cut reduction in the risk of stroke with blood pressure pills is important and may be complementary to lifestyle changes."
Dr Sharlin Ahmed of The Stroke Association said: “Making a few simple lifestyle choices, such as eating a healthy diet low in salt, giving up smoking, and exercising regularly can help to keep your blood pressure under control and can reduce your risk of stroke.
"As highlighted in this study, it may also be beneficial for some people with borderline high blood pressure to take blood pressure lowering medication, however this needs to be discussed with your GP.”
SOURCE
Unhealthy lifestyle responsible for 'half of cancers' (?)
Prof. Parkin is an industrious little blighter. He has taken seventeen supposed risk factors one by one and done a meta-analysis of the effects of each one. So he has a total of seventeen journal articles in the one issue of the British Journal of Cancer.
His industry did not however seem to include any critical thought. His conclusions are simply reinforcement of the conventional wisdom and he pays no heed to the elementary truth that correlation is not causation -- preferring to rely instead on the speculations of epidemiologists. He even makes significant use of heavily criticized analyses from the sensationalist WCRF -- e.g. here. Some of his conclusions may be correct but we have no means of knowing which they are. Many of the factors he identified could well in fact be social class effects
Almost half of cancers are caused by an unhealthy lifestyle that could be avoided by quitting smoking, losing weight, exercising and drinking less alcohol, the most comprehensive study of its kind has found.
Around 134,000 cancers each year are the result of a poor lifestyle, Cancer Research UK has found.
In the most wide reaching study yet conducted into the issue, it was found that 14 different lifestyle factors ranging from smoking, to lack of exercise, eating too much salt, not having babies, drinking too much and being overweight contributed to four in every ten cancers diagnosed in the UK.
The findings expose the myth that developing cancer is 'bad luck' or down to your genes, the researchers said.
Previous studies had suggested around 80,000 cancers a year could be prevented but they did not take into account occupational exposures to things like asbestos, infections that can cause cancer and sunburn as the latest research has.
In a complex set of research studies, scientists calculated how many cancers and of what type could be attributed to each of the 14 lifestyle factors. The findings were published in the British Journal of Cancer.
Smoking was the biggest factor, causing nearly one in five of all cancers.
But Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said most people would not know that a quarter of all breast cancer cases could be prevented along with half of colorectal cancers.
He added: "Leading a healthy lifestyle doesn't guarantee that someone will not get cancer but doing so will significantly stack the odds in your favour."
Dr Kumar said tackling unhealthy lifestyle factors linked to cancer would also reduce the risk of a host of other killer diseases such as heart disease, respiratory problems, kidney disease and others.
Professor Max Parkin, a Cancer Research UK epidemiologist based at Queen Mary, University of London, and study author, said: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get it.
“Looking at all the evidence, it’s clear that around 40 per cent of all cancers are caused by things we mostly have the power to change. “We didn’t expect to find that eating fruit and vegetables would prove to be so important in protecting men against cancer. And among women we didn’t expect being overweight to have a greater effect than alcohol."
The study found that alcohol was responsible for 6.4 per cent of breast cancers and almost one in ten liver cancers.
Three quarters of stomach cancers could be avoided, mostly by not smoking, eating too much salt and consuming more fruit and vegetables.
Red meat consumption led to 2.7 per cent of cancers, almost 8,500 cases. Obesity was linked to more than five per cent of cancers or almost 18000 cases, including a third of womb cancers.
Lack of breastfeeding was linked to 3.1 per cent of breast cancers and 17 per cent of ovarian cancers.
The study did not examine how many cancer deaths would be prevented with a healthier lifestyle.
Sara Hiom, director of information at Cancer Research UK, said: “We know, especially during the Christmas party season, that it is hard to watch what you eat and limit alcohol and we don’t want people to feel guilty about having a drink or indulging a bit more than usual. But it’s very important for people to understand that long term changes to their lifestyles can really reduce their cancer risk.”
The World Cancer Research Fund did a similar exercise in 2007 coming up with recommendations to individuals on how to reduce their cancer risk by eating less red meat, taking more exercise and staying slim.
Dr Rachel Thompson, Deputy Head of Science for World Cancer Research Fund, said: "This adds to the now overwhelmingly strong evidence that our cancer risk is affected by our lifestyles.
"We hope this new study helps to raise awareness of the fact that cancer is not simply a question of fate and that people can make changes today that can reduce their risk of developing cancer in the future."
Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive at Macmillan Cancer Support, said: "No one chooses to have cancer and it would be wrong to blame people for making wrong lifestyle choices.
"For a long time, people have been told that eating healthily, not smoking and exercising regularly can benefit them, and these figures show again the impact a healthy lifestyle can have. Yet these healthy lifestyle messages are clearly not reaching enough people. They also need to be made more relatable to people’s everyday lives.
"There needs to be a cultural change, so that people see physical activity as an integral part of their lives, not just a optional add-on.”
Public Health Minister Anne Milton said: "We all know that around 23,000 cases of lung cancer could be stopped each year in England if people didn't smoke.
"By making small changes we can cut our risk of serious health problems - give up smoking, watch what you drink, get more exercise and keep an eye on your weight."
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