November 2, 2006, 5:18 AM CT

Breakthrough In Eye Cancer Treatment

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have demonstrated in a mouse model a new, locally applied treatment for the eye cancer retinoblastoma that not only greatly reduces the size of the tumor, but does so without causing the side effects common with standard chemotherapy. The treatment also appears to be suitable for certain forms of breast, lung, prostate and colon cancer, and is simple enough for widespread use even in countries with limited resources.

A report on this work appears in the Nov. 2 issue of the journal Nature.

Retinoblastoma occurs in about 5,000 young children worldwide each year, arising from the immature retina, which is the part of the eye responsible for detecting light and color. The cancer is fatal if left untreated.

The new treatment holds promise for a simpler, more effective and less-toxic treatment for retinoblastoma that would eliminate the need for the current, complex therapy, according to senior author Michael Dyer, Ph.D., a Pew Scholar and associate member of the St. Jude Department of Developmental Neurobiology. The treatment is based on a discovery by Dyer's laboratory that overturned a widely held belief about the process of apoptosis (cell suicide) in retinoblastoma. Apoptosis is the way the body rids itself of abnormal cells that might become cancerous or cause other problems.........

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November 2, 2006, 5:00 AM CT

Intact Tonsils Triple Risk Of Recurrent Strep Throat

Children with recurrent strep throat whose tonsils have not been removed are over three times more likely to develop subsequent episodes of strep throat than children who undergo tonsillectomy, according to a Mayo Clinic study published in the Nov. 2 issue of Laryngoscope.

"These results suggest that tonsillectomy is a useful therapy for treating children with recurrent strep throat infections," says Laura Orvidas, M.D., Mayo Clinic ear, nose and throat surgeon and senior study investigator. "It should decrease the amount of infections experienced by this subset of children and therefore diminish the number of missed school days and hopefully improve overall quality of life".

Dr. Orvidas and colleagues conducted a population-based retrospective cohort study of children between ages 4 and 16 who received three or more diagnoses of strep-related tonsillitis or pharyngitis at least one month apart, within 12 months. Within this group, children who subsequently underwent a tonsillectomy were compared with an age- and sex-matched sample of children who had not had a tonsillectomy. The date of the tonsillectomy for the matched pair was defined as the index date. All strep infections were recorded for both groups of children.

The study population comprised 290 children (145 who received a tonsillectomy and 145 who did not). In the tonsillectomy group, 74 children experienced at least one strep infection after the index date and before age 16. Among those who did not receive a tonsillectomy, 122 experienced at least one strep infection during the follow-up. The time before first subsequent strep infection was much longer for those who had a tonsillectomy, a median of 1.1 years as compared to 0.6 years for children whose tonsils had not been removed. By one year after the index date, the cumulative incidence of a strep infection was 23.1 percent among the children who had a tonsillectomy compared to 58.5 percent among the children who had not.........

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November 1, 2006, 4:00 PM CT

Nap A Day Makes Doctors OK

Give emergency room doctors a nap, and not only will they do a better job, they'll also be nicer to you, according to a new study from Stanford University School of Medicine.

The findings, would be published in the recent issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, showed improved mood, a higher alertness level and the ability to complete a simulated I.V. insertion more quickly among doctors and nurses who were allowed a short nap while working the night shift in an emergency room.

"Napping is a very powerful, very inexpensive way of improving our work," said one of the study's authors, Steven Howard, MD, associate professor of anesthesia and expert on sleep deprivation and fatigue.

Howard has taken the results of the study one step further and begun implementing an official napping program at the hospital at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. "This is the first time a napping program has been instituted to try to get at the problem of fatigue in the workplace for health-care workers," he said.

According to statistics on America's need for sleep, plenty of people could use a nap. More than 50 percent of Americans are sleep-deprived.

Scientific research has documented the need for naps to mitigate drowsiness and improve performance and alertness in pilots and truckers, but no previous study has looked specifically at the possible benefits for health-care workers, said the first author of the study, Rebecca Smith-Coggins, MD, associate professor of surgery (emergency medicine).........

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November 1, 2006, 4:09 AM CT

Amniocentesis Safe For Pregnant Women

Amniocentesis is the most commonly prescribed invasive test performed during pregnancies in the United States. Most women fear them while doctors recommend them based on guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. These guidelines stem from past research studies and recommendations by the CDC that were based only on maternal age. Studies that are decades old have suggested that amniocentesis increases the rate of miscarriage by 0.5% or 1 in 200 pregnancies. However, researchers at Mount School of Medicine in conjunction with other institutions involved in the First and Second Trimester Evaluation of Risk for Aneuploidy trial (FASTER trial) have just reported in the recent issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, that pregnancy miscarriage rates after routine midtrimester amniocentesis are significantly lower than rates previously published years ago in the 1970s and 1980s. This study reports that the amniocentesis procedure- related loss risk is approximately 1 in 1,600 pregnancies.

Lead author of the study, "Pregnancy Loss Rates After Midtrimester Amniocentis", Dr. Keith E. Eddleman, MD, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine has found that this new study now refutes the typically quoted 0.5% pregnancy loss rate and suggests it may be even lower than 0.1%."Women should be counseled that this older loss rate is archaic and their decision about whether or not to have an amniocentesis should be based on contemporary information about miscarriage rates with newer screening techniques, rather than just relying on general age based risks," said Eddleman. "This new research breakthrough will have a significant effect on how women are counseled about amniocentesis by their doctors and the information they have when deciding about screening for their unborn child".........

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October 31, 2006, 9:12 PM CT

Light-sensitive Photoswitches For Macular Degeneration

A research center newly created by the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) aims to put light-sensitive switches in the body's cells that can be flipped on and off as easily as a remote control operates a TV.

Optical switches like these could trigger a chemical reaction, initiate a muscle contraction, activate a drug or stimulate a nerve cell - all at the flash of a light.

One major goal of the UC Berkeley-LBNL Nanomedicine Development Center is to equip cells of the retina with photoswitches, essentially making blind nerve cells see, restoring light sensitivity in people with degenerative blindness such as macular degeneration.

"We're asking the question, 'Can you control biological nanomolecules - in other words, proteins - with light?'" said center director and neurobiologist Ehud Y. Isacoff, professor of molecular and cell biology and chair of the Graduate Group in Biophysics at UC Berkeley. "If we can control them by light, then we could develop treatments for eye or skin diseases, even blood diseases, that can be activated by light. This challenge lies at the frontier of nanomedicine".

The research got off the ground this month thanks to a $6 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), part of a nanomedicine initiative within NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research. The initiative, which has funded eight Nanomedicine Development Centers around the country, including one last year at UCSF that involves UC Berkeley collaborators, is designed to "take cutting edge technology from one branch of science - nanotechnology - and apply it to another - medicine," according to Isacoff.........

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October 31, 2006, 4:02 AM CT

Topiramates Increases Risk Of Kidney Stones

Topiramate (Topamax), a drug usually prescribed to treat seizures and migraine headaches, can increase the propensity of calcium phosphate kidney stones, scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.

A study - the largest cross-sectional examination of how the long-term use of topiramate affects kidney-stone formation - appears in the recent issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases.

Several case reports have described an association between topiramate and the development of kidney stones, but this complication had not been well recognized and physicians have not informed patients about the risk, the UT Southwestern scientists said. More important, the mechanism of stone formation was largely unknown previously.

"The wide-spread and escalating use of topiramate emphasizes the importance of considering the long-term impact of this drug on kidney-stone formation," said Dr. Khashayar Sakhaee, senior author of the study and chief of mineral metabolism at UT Southwestern.

More than 29 million Americans suffer from migraines, with women being affected three times more often than men, as per the National Headache Foundation.

"Topiramate is probably one of the most usually prescribed and most effective neurological medications right now," said Dr. Dion Graybeal, assistant professor of neurology and an author of the study.........

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October 30, 2006, 8:46 PM CT

Brain's Response To Pleasing

We all have tastes we love, and tastes we hate. And yet, our "taste" for certain flavors and foods can change over time, as we get older or we get tired of eating the same old thing.

Now, a new University of Michigan study gives new evidence about what's going on in the brain when we taste something we like, or develop a liking for something we once hated.

And although the study used rats instead of people, it has direct implications for understanding the way we perceive pleasure and the reasons why some people develop problems, such as drug abuse, depression or anorexia, that knock their pleasure response off balance.

In a new paper in the recent issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology, U-M neuroscientists and psychologists report the findings from direct monitoring of an area of the brain known as the ventral pallidum. Located deep in the brain, it's a kind of traffic center for signals from different areas of the brain that process tastes and pleasurable sensations.

The researchers were able to track the activity of brain cells in that area while the rats received water, salt water and sugar water directly into their mouths. They also recorded how the rats behaved while they tasted those different solutions, including signs that they liked or disliked the tastes. And, they repeated the tests when the rats had been treated with drugs that greatly reduced their bodies' salt levels.........

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October 30, 2006, 8:15 PM CT

Dad Or Mom?

In families with two working parents, fathers had greater impact than mothers on their children's language development between ages 2 and 3, according to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Child Development Institute and UNC's School of Education.

Researchers videotaped pairs of parents and their 2-year-old children in their homes during playtime. The children whose fathers used more diverse vocabularies had greater language development when they were tested one year later. However, the mothers' vocabulary did not significantly affect a child's language skills.

"Most previous studies on early language development focused on mothers," said Nadya Panscofar, a graduate research assistant and an author of the study. "These findings underscore that for two-parent, dual earner families, fathers should be included in all efforts to improve language development and school readiness".

Panscofar and Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans, the William C. Friday distinguished professor of Child and Family Studies in the School of Education and a faculty fellow at FPG, conducted the study in Pennsylvania as part of the Penn State Health and Development Project when both were affiliated with that university.

The study appears in the online version of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. It will appear in the November print issue of that publication.........

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October 29, 2006, 7:14 PM CT

Nightmares, demons and slaves

Workplace bullying negatively impacts employees' physical and mental health, leading to higher company costs including increased employee illness, use of sick days, and medical costs, ultimately affecting productivity. Studies report that 25-30% of employees experience bullying and emotional abuse sometime during their work life.

In a recent study researching organizational conflict, emotion, wellness and work-life balance, published in the recent issue of SAGE Publication's Management Communication Quarterly, communication researchers Sarah Tracy, Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik, and Jess Alberts used metaphor analysis to better understand the emotional pain experienced as a result of workplace bullying.

The study, which was supported by a grant from Research and Economic Affairs at Arizona State University, and is part of "The Project of Wellness and Work-Life," collected qualitative data through focus groups, narrative interviews and target drawings, allowing participants the freedom to describe their workplace harassment as "a battle," "water torture," "a nightmare," or "a noxious substance." Bullies were described as "two-faced actors" and "devils" and the workers were left feeling like "vulnerable children," "slaves," or "prisoners" in these situations. As one employee explained, "I feel like I have 'kick me' tattooed on my forehead".........

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October 29, 2006, 6:46 PM CT

Switch Involved In Allergy Identified

A research team has identified a key enzyme responsible for triggering a chain of events that results in allergic reaction, according to new study findings published online this week in Nature Immunology.

The work by researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Hospital for Special Surgery and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York sets the stage for development of new strategies and target therapies that control allergic disease the sixth leading cause of chronic disease in the United States.

Allergic diseases such as asthma and hay fever are problematic for about 30 percent of the population in the developed world. Researchers have developed various treatments to control allergy, but no cure has been found.

The team has demonstrated, for the first time, the role of a proteolytic enzyme called ADAM10 that releases a major allergy regulatory protein from the surface of cells and thereby promotes a stronger allergic response. The identification of drugs that inhibit ADAM10's ability to release this molecule could revolutionize treatment of asthma and allergic disease.

"Our research, for the first time, may represent a treatment strategy to prevent, rather than simply control IgE-mediated allergy," said Daniel Conrad, Ph.D., a professor in VCU's Department of Microbiology and Immunology. Conrad directed the research conducted at VCU. IgE is an antibody known to trigger Type I allergic disease.........

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