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A study published in Bioscience Hypotheses proposes that some people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease experience a reduction in their high blood pressure because of cognitive decline. Researchers at the Osijek Medical Faculty in Croatia reviewed studies relating to dementia and blood pressure and note cognitive problems suffered by some Alzheimer’s patients have previously been put down to low blood pressure (arterial hypotension). They suggest that the opposite is true. As a patient’s memory fails, the researchers contend, they forget the causes of anxiety and worry that was causing high blood pressure: failing memory causes hypotension, not visa versa. Hypertension itself is a cause of disease, including strokes, so paradoxically, the hypothesis suggests, treatments which alleviate memory loss could affect other causes of illness. If this hypothesis is correct it could have a significant effect on the treatment of conditions such as metabolic syndrome, which involves increased weight and high blood pressure. If confirmed by further studies, the researchers said this will affect how doctors treat the elderly, helping to target drugs more effectively and reduce risks of stokes and heart attack. It also suggests that heart disease could be substantially reduced in old people simply by making them happier about themselves and their lives.

 

BREAST CANCER: STUDY FINDS NO LINK BETWEEN RISK FOR DISEASE AND CAFFEINE CONSUMPTION
Caffeine consumption does not appear to be associated with overall breast cancer risk, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine. However, researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, and Tokyo Women’s Medical University, Japan said there is a possibility of increased risk for women with benign breast disease or for tumors that are hormone-receptor negative or larger than 2 centimeters. Caffeine is probably the most commonly consumed drug worldwide, present in coffee, tea, chocolate and some medications. It was hypothesized that caffeine may increase the risk of breast cancer after a study showed that women with non-cancerous breast disease experienced relief from their symptoms after removing caffeine from their diet. The researchers found consumption of caffeine and caffeinated beverages and foods was not statistically significantly associated with overall risk of breast cancer. Among women with benign breast disease, a non-significant positive association with breast cancer risk was observed for those in the highest fifth of caffeine consumption and a significant association was observed for those in the highest category of coffee consumption (four cups or more daily). Consuming caffeine was also associated with a 68 percent increased risk of estrogen receptor–negative and progesterone receptor–negative breast cancer, or tumors to which the hormones estrogen and progesterone do not bind, and a 79 percent increased risk for breast tumors larger than 2 centimeters.

 

A study in the journal Science indicates that obese individuals may overeat because they experience less satisfaction from eating food due to a reduced response in their brains’ reward circuitry. Results from two studies—the first prospective brain imaging studies on the development of obesity as it relates to decreased dopamine output—suggest that individuals who experience weaker activation of reward circuitry when eating are more likely to be obese and are more likely to gain weight over time. This effect is even more pronounced for people with a gene that is associated with compromised dopamine signaling in this brain reward circuitry. The research reflects a collaborative effort between clinical psychologists from Oregon Research Institute and the University of Texas and sensory neuroscientists from the John B. Pierce Laboratory and the Yale University School of Medicine.

 

Researchers at McGill University, King’s College London, and GlaxoSmithKline have identified two genetic variants in caucasians that together produce a sevenfold increase risk of male pattern baldness. About a third of all men are affected by male pattern baldness by age 45, according to the study in Nature Genetics. Male pattern baldness is the most common form of baldness, where hair is lost in a well-defined pattern beginning above both temples, and results in a distinctive M-shaped hairline. Estimates suggest more than 80 percent of cases are hereditary. Along with colleagues in Iceland, Switzerland and the Netherlands, the researchers conducted a genome-wide association study of 1,125 caucasian men who had been assessed for male pattern baldness. They found two previously unknown genetic variants on chromosome 20 that substantially increased the risk of male pattern baldness. They then confirmed these findings in an additional 1,650 caucasian men. Though the researchers consider their discovery to be a scientific breakthrough, they said it does not mean a treatment or cure for male pattern baldness is imminent. Researchers said that if people have both the risk variants they discovered on chromosome 20 and the unrelated known variant on the X chromosome, that person’s risk of becoming bald increases sevenfold. One in seven men have both of those risk variants, researchers said.

 

The more alcohol an individual drinks, the smaller his or her total brain volume, according to researchers at Wellesley College. The findings, published in the Archives of Neurology, showa significant negative linear relationship between alcohol consumption and total cerebral brain volume. Brain volume decreases with age at an estimated rate of 1.9 percent per decade, accompanied by an increase in white matter lesions. While moderate alcohol consumption has been associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease; because the brain receives blood from this system, researchers have hypothesized that small amounts of alcohol may also attenuate age-related declines in brain volume. The study suggests that, unlike the associations with cardiovascular disease, alcohol consumption does not have any protective effect on brain volume.

 

STROKE: SCIENTIST RESTORE MOVEMENT TO PARALYZED LIMBS THROUGH ARTIFICIAL BRAIN-MUSCLE CONNECTIONS
Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke demonstrated for the first time that a direct artificial connection from the brain to muscles can restore voluntary movement in monkeys whose arms have been temporarily anesthetized. The results, published in the journal Nature, may have promising implications for the quarter of a million Americans affected by spinal cord injuries and thousands of others with paralyzing neurological diseases, the researchers said. However, they caution that clinical applications are years away. The study demonstrates a novel approach to restoring movement through neuroprosthetic devices, one that would link a person's brain to the activation of individual muscles in a paralyzed limb to produce natural control and movements.

 

BLINDNESS: VISION LOSS MORE COMMON IN PEOPLE WITH DIABETES
Visual impairment appears to be more common in people with diabetes than in those without the disease, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a study in the Archives of Ophthalmology, researchers report that an estimated 11 percent of American adults with diabetes had some form of visual impairment (3.8 percent uncorrectable and 7.2 percent correctable), while only 5.9 percent of those without diabetes had some form of visual impairment (1.4 percent uncorrectable and 4.5 percent correctable). The researchers said people with diabetes were more likely to have uncorrectable vision impairment than those without diabetes, even after controlling for selected other factors. Approximately 14.6 million Americans had diagnosed diabetes mellitus in 2005 and another 6.2 million had undiagnosed diabetes.

 

A study conducted at the University of Illinois shows that children with ADHD demonstrate greater attention after a 20-minute walk in a park than after a similar walk in a downtown area or a residential neighborhood. The study, published in the Journal of Attention Disorders, found a dose of nature could be as effective as a dose of a stimulant, at least for a while. The researchers said their study showed that the physical environment matters. They do not know what it is about a park exactly—the greenness or lack of buildings—that seems to improve attention, but the study said that even though everything else was the same—who the child was with, the levels of noise, the length of time, the time of day, whether the child was on medication they saw a measurable difference in the children’s symptoms just by changing the environment. The study was based on work supported by the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council, U.S. Forest Service.

 

AGE-RELATED MACULAR DEGENERATION: SUNLIGHT AND LOW ANTIOXIDANT LEVELS PUT OLDER ADULTS AT RISK
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine suggests that the combination of low plasma levels of antioxidants and blue light exposure from the sun is associated with certain forms of the eye disease age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In a report of in the Archives of Ophthalmology, the researchers found that blue light exposure was associated with neovascular AMD in the one-fourth of individuals with lowest antioxidant levels in a study of 4,400 participants. In particular, the combination of blue light exposure in the presence of low levels of zeaxanthin, vitamin E, and vitamin C was associated with a nearly four-fold odds ratio of neovascular AMD. The researchers recommend ensuring the intake of key antioxidants, which can be accomplished by consuming recommended dietary intake levels of vitamin C and zinc and increasing consumption of carotenoid-rich fruits and vegetables. They also said people should take steps to reduce the exposure of the retina to blue light, such as wearing broad-brimmed hats and sunglasses when outdoors.

 

Only about half of Medicaid recipients age 50 and older appear to receive recommended screening tests for colorectal, breast, and cervical cancer, according to researchers at the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Raleigh, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. These three types of cancer are potentially curable when detected early, and eliminating disparities in screenings is part of the government’s Healthy People 2010 plan, said the background information in the study in Archives of Internal Medicine. The researchers studied a representative sample of 1,951 North Carolina Medicaid recipients age 50 and older. They said that documentation that colorectal, breast, and cervical cancer screening was recommended by the primary care provider was found for only 52.7 percent, 60.4 percent and 51.5 percent of eligible patients, respectively. What’s more, documented rates of adequate screening were 28.2 percent for colorectal cancer, 31.7 percent for mammography within two years, and 31.6 percent for Papanicolaou [cervical cancer] test within three years, the researchers said. When medical record and claims data were combined, approximately half of eligible patients had evidence of screening

A majority of Parkinson’s disease patients have insufficient levels of vitamin D, said researchers from Emory University School of Medicine. The fraction of Parkinson’s patients with vitamin D insufficiency, 55 percent, was significantly more than patients with Alzheimer’s disease (41 percent) or healthy elderly people (36 percent), according to the study in Archives of Neurology. Most Americans get the majority of their vitamin D from exposure to sunlight or by dietary supplements; fortified foods such as milk and packaged cereals are a minor source. Only a few foods in nature contain substantial amounts of vitamin D, such as salmon and tuna. The body’s ability to produce vitamin D using UV-B radiation from the sun decreases with age, making older individuals at increased risk of vitamin D deficiency. Researchers said the study adds to evidence that low vitamin D is associated with Parkinson’s. They said the connection could come partly because patients with Parkinson’s have mobility problems and are seldom exposed to the sun, or because low vitamin D levels are in some way related to the genesis or progression of the disease. The study found that the fraction of patients with the lowest levels of vitamin D, described as vitamin D deficiency, was higher (23 percent) in the Parkinson’s group than the Alzheimer’s group (16 percent) or the healthy group (10 percent). The retrospective study examined 100 people in each group, who were recruited between 1992 and 2007.

 

RACIAL DISCREPANCIES: BLACK PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC PAIN LESS LIKELY TO HAVE OBESITY ASSESSED
Researchers from the University of Michigan Health System found black patients with chronic pain were less likely to have their weight or body mass index (BMI) recorded, even though they are at higher risk for having obesity when compared with their white counterparts. The study, published in the Journal of Pain, also revealed that obesity is related to greater disability and poorer functioning, over and above the impact of a person’s pain level. Obesity contributes to chronic pain and several other chronic conditions, leading to decreased health and quality of life. Chronic pain also leads to decreased health and quality of life. Disparities in the chronic pain experience and obesity exist, with blacks more likely to be negatively impacted. It is not clear why it was less likely black patients would have their BMI measured, even though they may be at increased risk for higher BMI and obesity, researchers said. But they point out that the gap could indicate a lower quality of care than what is provided to white patients.

 

Hospital-based smoking cessation programs, along with referrals to cardiac rehabilitation, appear to be associated with increased rates of quitting smoking following heart attack, according to Emory University researchers. In the study reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers studied 639 patients who smoked at the time of their hospitalization for heart attack. Six months later, 297 of the patients—approximately 47 percent of them—had quit smoking. The researchers said the odds of quitting were greater among patients who received discharge recommendations for cardiac rehabilitation and those who were treated at a facility offering an inpatient smoking cessation program. However, individual counseling was not associated with quit rates, the researchers said. They added that the findings are important because cardiac rehabilitation and hospital-based smoking cessation programs appear to be under-utilized in current clinical practice and should be potentially considered as a measure of healthcare quality for patients with heart attack.

 

Rutgers University researchers said they are hot on the trail of a whole new class of broad-spectrum antibiotics that may offer a more effective and shorter course of treatment for tuberculosis, a disease that is carried by one in three people in the world and that is particularly difficult to treat with today’s antibiotics. Researchers said the discovery holds promise at a time when a quarter of all deaths worldwide are the result of bacterial infectious diseases, and yet more and more disease-causing bacteria are growing resistant to currently available antibiotics. The study was published in Cell. Researchers said they have discovered how three antibiotic compounds—all of which are natural products produced by certain bacteria for use in a kind of chemical warfare against other bacteria —work to kill bacteria. The finding sets the stage for developing even more effective and specific compounds, a challenge the researchers already have well underway. The antibiotic compounds, called myxopyronin, corallopyronin, and ripostatin, block the action of RNA polymerase specifically in bacteria, the researchers said. RNA polymerase is an essential protein in all organisms and is required to transcribe the genetic instructions in DNA into RNA, which in turn directs the assembly of proteins.

 

Researchers at the London Centre for Nanotechnology at University College London said they are using a novel nanomechanical approach to investigate the workings of the antibiotic vancomycin, paving the way for the development of more effective new drugs. Vancomycin is one of the few antibiotics that can be used to combat increasingly resistant infections such as MRSA according to the article in Nature Nanotechnology. The researchers said they used cantilever arrays—tiny levers no wider than a human hair–to examine the process which ordinarily takes place in the body when vancomycin binds itself to the surface of the bacteria. They coated the cantilever array with mucopeptides from bacterial cell walls and found that as the antibiotic attaches itself, it generates a surface stress on the bacteria which can be detected by a tiny bending of the levers. The researchers suggest that this stress contributes to the disruption of the cell walls and the breakdown of the bacteria. They said that “superbugs” are resistant to antibiotics because of a simple mutation, which deletes a single hydrogen bond from the structure of their cell walls. This small change makes it about 1,000 times harder for the antibiotic to attach itself to the bug, leaving it much less able to disrupt the cells’ structure, and therefore therapeutically ineffective. They added that the research on cantilever sensors suggests that the cell wall is disrupted by a combination of local antibiotic-mucopeptide binding and the spatial mechanical connectivity of these events. Investigating both these binding and mechanical influences on the cells’ structure could lead to the development of more powerful and effective antibiotics in future, they said.

 

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: REPORT SAYS U.S. SYSTEM IS BROKEN AND MUST BE TRANSFORMED
The U.S. intellectual property is broken and must be transformed if it is to foster biotechnological advances and ensure that treatments and cures for diseases reach patients, according to national and international IP and biotech leaders. Researchers from McGill and Duke universities said patent holders are not doing a good job of sharing information and biotechnological tools to foster innovation and access to vital genetic data. The report entitled “Toward a New Era of Intellectual Property: From Confrontation to Negotiation - from the International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property” chronicles the development and commercialization of several genetic diagnostic tests. The researchers said the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries’ heavy reliance on patents and aggressive enforcement of IP are creating an environment of intimidation that prevents scientists from using tools that are vital to innovation, while blocking access to diagnostic tests that may have important implications for science and for public health. Among the suggestions, companies should adapt to the needs of consumers and payers through more open and flexible licensing, the researchers said. Other recommendations include fostering greater trust between actors, creating better ways to develop and deliver biotechnology products, encouraging the sharing of molecular libraries and basic environmental technologies, allowing for exchanges of data, materials, and patents, and overcoming concerns about high risk through joint public and private funding of promising avenues of research.

 

HOSPITAL QUALITY: DEATH RATE 70 PERCENT LOWER AT TOP-RATED FACILITIES
Patients have on average a 70 percent lower chance of dying at the nation’s top-rated hospitals compared with the lowest-rated hospitals across 17 procedures and conditions, according to a study from the independent healthcare rating organization HealthGrades. The organization’s 11th annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study found that while overall death rates declined from 2005 to 2007, the nation’s best-performing hospitals were able to reduce their death rates at a much faster rate than poorly performing hospitals, resulting in large state, regional and hospital-to-hospital variations in the quality of patient care. The study also found that if all hospitals performed at the level of five-star rated hospitals, 237,420 Medicare deaths could potentially have been prevented over the three years studied. More than half of those deaths were associated with four conditions: sepsis (a life-threatening illness caused by systemic response to infection), pneumonia, heart failure and respiratory failure.

 

HEART DISEASE: DRUG MAY REDUCE CORONARY ARTERY PLAQUE
Olmesartan, a drug commonly used to treat high blood pressure, may play a role in reducing coronary plaque, according to researchers at the Sakakibara Heart Institute of Okayama in Okayama, Japan. In findings presented at the 20th annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics scientific symposium, the researchers reported that Serial Intravenous Ultrasound showed significant decreases in measurement of plaque volume in patients who used olmesartan after 14 months of treatment.

 

NiTi Surgical Solutions, a privately held Israeli company focused on medical technologies for gastrointestinal surgery, said its Compression Anastomosis Ring for reconnecting tissues naturally after colorectal surgery has been used in 500 colorectal surgical procedures. The company said the device, which represents an advancement in tissue reconnection or “anastomosis” has shown promising results in accelerating recovery time and reducing post-surgical complications over mechanical stapling, the surgical standard for more than 30 years. The company discussed preliminary outcomes of its use at the American College of Surgeons 94th Clinical Congress in San Francisco. Each year, more than 500,000 surgeries involving GI tract resection are performed in the United States after removing sections of the colon damaged by colon cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, diverticulitis, and other GI conditions. The company’s alternative to circular stables has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for colorectal and gastrointestinal surgeries and is also CE marked for marketing in Europe, the company said. It added that the completion of 500 procedures using the NiTi ring brings surgeons around the world a safe, viable way to reconnect tissue after surgeries and new hope to their patients. The device reconnects tissue using a sophisticated ring with parts made of advanced Nitinol, a strong but pliable nickel titanium that has “shape memory.” During placement, elasticity of the Nitinol leaf springs enables the ring to adapt to differences in tissue thickness, uniformly bringing together tissues while applying consistent, controlled pressure for natural healing to occur. When the tissue connection is healed, within weeks, the ring passes out of the body, leaving behind healthy tissue that shows minimal signs of the surgery performance and leaving no foreign material in the body unlike staples, which are left permanently behind, the company said.