StemCell Therapy

(HealthDay News) -- People with type 1 diabetes don't need to worry that they may have brain function problems in the future if they've had a bout or two of severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), a new study suggests.

Researchers found that while serious hypoglycemic episodes did sometimes occur as a result of aggressive diabetes control, those low blood sugar events didn't have any effect on cognitive function.

"Hypoglycemia did not seem to predict the advent of worsening cognitive function," said the study's lead author, Dr. Alan Jacobson, director of the behavioral and mental health research program at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

"Of course, it goes without saying that hypoglycemia can be a serious problem," he added. "But, if you've had a more severe hypoglycemia event, at least it appears that you don't have to worry that 10 years later you may have trouble doing your job or thinking," he said.

Results of the study were published in the May 3 New England Journal of Medicine. Read more...

Detox cleansing

When Jim Laidler’s oldest son, Benjamin, was diagnosed with autism, he and his wife started looking for help. “The neurologists were saying, ‘We don’t know what causes autism, and we don’t know what the outcome for your son will be,’” Laidler relates. “No one was saying, ‘Here’s what causes it; here’s what treats it.’”

But when the Laidlers, who live in Portland, Ore., searched the Web, they found dozens of “biomedical” treatments that promised to improve or even cure Benjamin’s inability to talk, interact socially or control his movements. So the parents tried them on their son. They began with vitamin B6 and magnesium, the nutritional supplements dimethylglycine and tri­methylglycine, vitamin A, gluten- and casein-free diets, the digestive hormone secretin, and chelation, a drug therapy de­signed to purge the body of lead and mercury. They applied the purported treatments to Benjamin’s little brother, David, who also was diagnosed with autism. Chelation did not seem to help much. Any effect from secretin was hard to tell. The diets showed promise; the Laidlers hauled special food with them everywhere. And Mom and Dad continued to feed the boys dozens of supplements, calibrating doses up and down with every change in behavior.

[More]

(HealthDay News) -- An intensive lifestyle change program helped people with type 2 diabetes lose weight and keep it off, a new study shows.

The program also led to improved control of blood glucose levels and reduced risk factors for cardiovascular disease, both of which are critical in preventing long-term complications caused by diabetes.

The study included 5,145 overweight or obese people, average age 58.7, with type 2 diabetes. About half were assigned to a lifestyle intervention that included diet changes and physical activity designed to achieve a 7 percent weight loss in the first year and maintain it in subsequent years.

The other participants were assigned to a diabetes education and support group that held three sessions a year to discuss diet, exercise and social support.

After four years, the participants in the lifestyle intervention group had lost an average of 6.2 percent of their body weight, compared with 0.9 percent for the diabetes support group. The lifestyle intervention group also had greater improvements in fitness, blood glucose control, blood pressure and levels of "good" HDL cholesterol. Read more...

Detox and cleanse

(NaturalNews) Many herbal remedies are used to treat symptoms of diabetes and have shown results in naturally lowering blood sugar levels. Scientific research is now shedding new light on the mechanisms used since ancient times to treat diabetes with herbs and nutrition.

Diabetes was noted as far back as Ancient Greece. The name comes from two Greek words meaning the siphon and to run through, which describes the diabetic symptom of excess urine. Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, where over twenty three million, almost eight percent of the population, have been diagnosed with the disorder. The number of cases of diabetes doubled from 1990 to 2005 and is expected to double again by 2050. Side effects of diabetes include kidney disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, blindness and hearing loss.

The cause of diabetes is not known but 90% of those with Type 2 diabetes are obese. Most consider that diabetes is triggered by numerous factors, including inheritance, nutrition, obesity, infection, hormonal imbalances, and stress. Read more...

Healthy blood

(HealthDay News) -- Researchers report that germs living in your gut could affect your risk of developing colon cancer.

The findings suggest that signs of the existence of some germs "are more frequently detected in subjects with polyps, early lesions that can develop into cancer, while other bacterial signatures are less frequently observed in such individuals," Tyler Culpepper, a University of Florida researcher, said in a news release.

Culpepper and colleagues studied 91 patients and took biopsy samples from their colons. They analyzed the bacteria in 30 people who had at least one polyp and 30 people who didn't but were of similar age and gender.

Researchers found some bacterial signatures only in those who had polyps and others only in those who didn't. Others were more common in one group or the other.

The findings suggest that future screening tests could aim to detect signs of trouble in the colon by measuring bacteria levels, Culpepper said. Read more...

Detox the body

This article has some useful information but, of course, cannot openly tell their readers that this is truly valuable so they have to attack it somehow. If you are not taking ACS 200 yourself, maybe you do not believe that it has germ killing powers?

I believe that infections are part of our current health crisis! I believe that it is well proven that we have organisms in the mouth that are difficult to identify and dangerous when they make their way into the systemic circulation, which they ALWAYS manage to do. I hold my ACS 200 in the mouth at least a minute 2-3 times a day. I think that lowering my total body burden of infections is just as useful for optimizing my health as lowering my burden of other toxins, like heavy metals.

Your patients may be confused by this article so take a moment to see it lacks clarity and even contradicts itself. Read more...

Lose weight quick

(HealthDay News) -- Positive brain changes take hold after just 11 hours of practicing a form of meditation, the results of a new study suggest.

The study included 45 University of Oregon students who were randomly selected to be in either a study group that did integrative body-mind training (IBMT) or a control group that did relaxation training. IBMT was adapted from traditional Chinese medicine in the 1990s.

A comparison of scans taken of the students' brains before and after the training showed that those in the IBMT group had increased brain connectivity. The changes were strongest in connections involving the anterior cingulate, an area that plays a role in the regulation of emotions and behavior, Yi-Yuan Tang of Dalian University of Technology in China, University of Oregon psychologist Michael I. Posner, and colleagues found.

The boost in brain connectivity began after six hours of IBMT and became more apparent after 11 hours of practice, according to the report published in the Aug. 16-21 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read more...

Memory concentration, loss of memory

Meat allergies may be much more common than previously thought and may even induce potentially fatal anaphylaxis in some people, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Virginia and presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in New Orleans.

The researchers tested three groups of people across the U.S. Southeast with a history of recurrent anaphylaxis without known cause for an immune reaction to alpha-gal, a kind of sugar found in mammal meat.

Although most allergic reactions are caused by proteins, scientists recently discovered that alpha-gal is responsible for anaphylactic reactions to cetuximab, a cancer drug. Further studies revealed that people who experience immune responses to alpha-gal also develop allergic symptoms within three to six hours of eating mammalian meat.

Alpha-gal is not found in the flesh of bird or fish.

The researchers found that between 20 and 50 percent of participants tested positive for allergy to alpha-gal. Overall, 25 of 60 participants (42 percent) showed signs of meat allergy. Read more...

Female Sexual health

In the past researchers have observed an association between poor mitochondrial function and Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder of the central nervous system that impairs speech and motor functions and affects five million people worldwide. A new meta-analysis suggests that low expression levels of 10 related gene sets responsible for mitochondrial machinery play an important role in this disorder--all previously unlinked to Parkinson's. The study, published online today in Science Translational Medicine , further points to a master switch for these gene sets as a potential target of future therapies. [More]

Editor's Note: This is an expanded version of the Q&A that will appear in the November 2010 issue of Scientific American.

Name: Greg Graffin [More]

Greg Graffin - BadReligion - Punk rock - Punk - Shopping

Realistic stem cell therapies to replace diseased or damaged tissue may still be years away, but researchers have uncovered a promising new use for these undifferentiated cells: they can be programmed to become patient-specific laboratory models of inherited liver disease. These new tools could be useful for teasing out disease mechanisms and testing new drug therapies.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge's Institute for Medical Research obtained skin cells from 10 patients--seven who had various forms of inherited liver disease, and three healthy controls. They reprogrammed the skin cells, rejuvenating them into an embryolike state (using the four-gene approach described in 2007). The researchers then cultured these so-called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) in a mixture of chemical factors that triggered their conversion into liver cells, which had the appearance and functional properties of native liver cells.

[More]

Stem cell - Cambridge University - Liver - Medical Research - Disease

Product marketing teams look at the software buying cycle as a consistent series of steps: awareness, consideration, trial, purchase, implementation and renewal.   For years, these steps have been manipulated through solution selling  where the key to success is control.  By knowing the buyer, the steps and the product, a skilled selling team is able to control the process and predict favorable outcomes on a consistent basis.  Oracle, SAP and Mic … Read More

via Inner Lining

GE Healthcare announced that the Smart Patient Room pilot at Bassett Medical Center has been approved by the site’s Institutional Review Board to begin data collection. The innovative technology solution was installed as part of GE’s healthymagination initiative with the goal of helping healthcare providers to reduce patient safety risks and improve patient outcomes.

“GE is developing a unique solution for the healthcare industry that helps hospitals and staff identify and mitigate patient safety risks while offering meaningful solutions to improve patient outcomes,” said Jan De Witte, President & CEO, GE Healthcare Performance Solutions. “GE’s real-time, adaptable solution will provide actionable data to healthcare providers regarding patient safety and potential medical errors which in turn will affect the necessary behavioral changes to avoid preventable errors.”

The Smart Patient Room can collect real-time information from the system to generate actionable data to manage clinical workflow, and uncover opportunities for influencing process and behavioral changes to create a safer patient environment.

developers at Mount Sinai develop a New database and software, called ChEA which can speed up drug discovery at Mount Sinai develop a New database and software, called ChEA which can speed up drug discovery

The ChEA software and ChIP-X database is freely available online at:http://amp.pharm.mssm.edu/lib/chea.jsp.

until ChEA was developed, no centralized database integrated results from, for instance, ChIP-seq and ChIP-chip experiments (these are used to identify how “transcription factor” proteins might regulate all genes in humans and mice). Now this new computational method should help streamline how scientists analyze these gene expression experiments

Insights into the stem cells of chronic myeloid leukemia by I Sloma, X Jiang, A C Eaves and C J Eaves, Leukemia 2010(Sep 23). [Epub ahead of print][PubMed citation]. Abstract:

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) has long served as a paradigm for generating new insights into the cellular origin, pathogenesis and improved approaches to treating many types of human cancer. Early studies of the cellular phenotypes and genotypes represented in leukemic populations obtained from CML patients established the concept of an evolving clonal disorder originating in and initially sustained by a rare, multipotent, self-maintaining hematopoietic stem cell (HSC). More recent investigations continue to support this model, while also revealing new insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms that explain how knowledge of CML stem cells and their early differentiating progeny can predict the differing and variable features of chronic phase and blast crisis. In particular, these emphasize the need for new agents that effectively and specifically target CML stem cells to produce non-toxic, but curative therapies that do not require lifelong treatments.

Critical molecular pathways in cancer stem cells of chronic myeloid leukemia by Y Chen, C Peng, C Sullivan, D Li and S Li, Leukemia 2010(Sep); 24(9): 1545-54. Epub 2010 Jun 24. [Connotea bookmark][PubMed citation][Full text]. The abstract of this OA review:

Inhibition of BCR-ABL with kinase inhibitors in the treatment of Philadelphia-positive (Ph(+)) chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is highly effective in controlling but not curing the disease. This is largely due to the inability of these kinase inhibitors to kill leukemia stem cells (LSCs) responsible for disease relapse. This stem cell resistance is not associated with the BCR-ABL kinase domain mutations resistant to kinase inhibitors. Development of curative therapies for CML requires the identification of crucial molecular pathways responsible for the survival and self-renewal of LSCs. In this review, we will discuss our current understanding of these crucial molecular pathways in LSCs and the available therapeutic strategies for targeting these stem cells in CML.

Do we have to kill the last CML cell? DM Ross, TP Hughes and JV Melo, Leukemia 2010(Sep 16) [Epub ahead of print][FriendFeed entry][PubMed citation][Full text]. The abstract of this OA review:

Previous experience in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemic (CML) has shown that the achievement of clinical, morphological and cytogenetic remission does not indicate eradication of the disease. A complete molecular response (CMR; no detectable BCR-ABL mRNA) represents a deeper level of response, but even CMR is not a guarantee of elimination of the leukaemic, because the significance of CMR is determined by the detection limit of the assay that is used. Two studies of imatinib cessation in CMR are underway, cumulatively involving over 100 patients. The current estimated rate of stable CMR after stopping imatinib is approximately 40%, but the duration of follow-up is relatively short. The factors that determine relapse risk are yet to be identified. The intrinsic capacity of any residual leukaemic cells to proliferate following the withdrawal of treatment may be important, but there may also be a role for immunological suppression of the leukaemic clone. No currently available test can formally prove that the leukaemic clone is eradicated. Here we discuss the sensitive measurement of minimal residual disease, and speculate on the biology of BCR-ABL-positive cells that may persist after effective therapy of CML.