Tag Archives: Health Care

High Fructose Corn Syrup is Not Natural Food

Products containing high fructose corn syrup cannot be considered ‘natural’ and should not be labeled as such, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has said.
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Industry group Sugar Association, as well as consumer groups such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest categorically maintain that HFCS cannot be considered natural because its chemical bonds are broken and rearranged in the manufacturing process. The debate raged on for one simple reason: FDA does not define the term ‘natural’, and it has therefore been left open to different interpretations.

However, in response to an inquiry from FoodNavigator-USA.com, the regulatory agency examined the composition of HFCS, which it said is produced using synthetic fixing agents. “Consequently, we would object to the use of the term ‘natural’ on a product containing HFCS,” the agency’s Geraldine June said in an e-mail to FoodNavigator-USA.com. June is Supervisor of the Product Evaluation and Labeling team at FDA’s Office of Nutrition, Labeling and Dietary Supplements.

High fructose corn syrup is also high on the list of problem foods from a health perspective.

Exercise to Reduce Fatigue

Low-Intensity Exercise Edges Out Fatigue — Without Requiring Lots of Sweat

If fatigue hounds your days, a little exercise may shoo it away without leaving you drenched with sweat. So say University of Georgia researchers. In a new study, they report that healthy young adults who say they’re tired all the time got an energy boost from a low-intensity workout plan.

Here’s all it took: three sessions per week of pedaling a stationary bicycle at a mild pace. They didn’t need to train every day, and they didn’t push themselves too far — just far enough to shake their fatigue

As I have said before, I have found exercise reduces fatigue myself.

Scientists Reconsider Autism

Webcast – In My Language – about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, language, and communication, and what does not.

Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know

This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers who are taking a fresh look at the nature of autism itself. The condition, they say, shouldn’t be thought of as a disease to be eradicated. It may be that the autistic brain is not defective but simply different — an example of the variety of human development. These researchers assert that the focus on finding a cure for autism — the disease model — has kept science from asking fundamental questions about how autistic brains function.

A cornerstone of this new approach — call it the difference model — is that past research about autistic intelligence is flawed, perhaps catastrophically so, because the instruments used to measure intelligence are bogus. “If Amanda Baggs had walked into my clinic five years ago,” says Massachusetts General Hospital neuroscientist Thomas Zeffiro, one of the leading proponents of the difference model, “I would have said she was a low-functioning autistic with significant cognitive impairment. And I would have been totally wrong.”
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And that hurts autistic people, Dawson says. She makes a comparison with blindness. Of course blind people have a disability and need special accommodation. But you wouldn’t give a blind person a test heavily dependent on vision and interpret their poor score as an accurate measure of intelligence. Mottron is unequivocal: Because of recent research, especially the Raven paper, it’s clearer than ever that so-called low-functioning people like Amanda Baggs are more intelligent than once presumed.The Dawson paper was hardly conclusive, but it generated buzz among scientists and the media. Mottron’s team is now collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital’s Zeffiro, a neuroimaging expert, to dig deeper.

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Funding Medical Research

Cheap, ‘safe’ drug kills most cancers

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis’s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died

The University of Alberta is raising funds to further the research. Some look at this and indite a funding system that does not support research for human health unless there is profit to be made. Much of the blame seems to go to profit focused drug companies. I can see room for some criticism. But really I think the criticism is misplaced.

The organizations for which curing cancer is the partial aim (rather than making money) say government (partial aim or public health…), public universities (partial aim of science research or medical research…), foundations, cancer societies, private universities… should fund such efforts, if they have merit. Universities have huge research budgets. Unfortunately many see profit as their objective and research as the means to the objective (based on their actions not their claims). These entities with supposedly noble purposes are the entities I blame most, not profit focused companies (though yes, if they claim an aim of health care they I would blame them too).

Now I don’t know what category this particular research falls into. Extremely promising or a decent risk that might work just like hundreds or thousands of other possibilities. But lets look at several possibilities. Some others thoughts on where it falls: Dichloroacetate to enter clinical trials in cancer patients, from a previous post here – Not a Cancer Cure Yet, The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle, CBC’s ‘The Current’ on dichloroacetate (DCA), Dichloroacetate (DCA) Phase II Trial To Begin (“Like hundreds (if not, thousands) of compounds being tested to treat cancer, DCA was shown by Michelakis’ group earlier this year to slow the growth of human lung tumors in a preclinical rodent model.”).
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Virus Engineered To Kill Deadly Brain Tumors

Yale Lab Engineers Virus That Can Kill Deadly Brain Tumors

A laboratory-engineered virus that can find its way through the vascular system and kill deadly brain tumors has been developed by Yale School of Medicine researchers, it was reported this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Each year 200,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with a brain tumor, and metastatic tumors and glioblastomas make up a large part of these tumors. There currently is no cure for these types of tumors, and they generally result in death within months.
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“Three days after inoculation, the tumors were completely or almost completely infected with the virus and the tumor cells were dying or dead,” van den Pol said. “We were able to target different types of cancer cells. Within the same time frame, normal mouse brain cells or normal human brain cells transplanted into mice were spared. This underlines the virus’ potential therapeutic value against multiple types of brain cancers.”

Pretty cool. Too bad these press releases never quite live up to the initial promise. Still this one is very cool, if it can succeed in helping even a small percentage of people it will be a great breakthrough. It is also just cool – using a virus to kill tumors – how cool is that?

The Risks of Scanning

The Risks of Scanning by Nayer Khazeni, M.D

When ordered by your doctor in the proper setting, any risks of CT scans are far outweighed by their potential benefits. They are one of modern medicine’s greatest diagnostic tools, used to examine any part of your body and, increasingly, to guide minimally invasive procedures previously performed with surgery. CT rapidly rotates X-ray beams around you, obtaining images from different angles that a powerful computer then compiles to build, slice by slice, highly detailed pictures of your insides.
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The impressive level of detail that CT provides can also cause confusion. In CTs of healthy adults, more than 90 percent of findings are “false positives.”
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Full-body CT scans cost $500 to $1,000. Insurance companies do not cover the cost, but may use any detected abnormality to raise your premiums or limit future coverage. There are no public health organizations that advocate the use of full body or cardiac CT scans in healthy adults, and the American College of Radiology and American Heart Association have released statements recommending against them.

One Reason Bacteria Gain Tolerance So Quickly

I recently read Good Gems, Bad Germs as part of my effort to learn more about bacteria, viruses, how are bodies work, cells, microbiology etc.. It is a great book, I highly recommend it. Page 111:

In 1951 the husband-wife team of Joshua and Esther Lederberg, microbiologists at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated that their elegantly simple proof that preexisting mutations, not gradual tolerance, accounted for the many instances of new drug resistance… This meant that every new antibiotic became a powerful new force for bacterial evolution, winnowing away every bacterium but the otherwise unremarkable one that could survive its effects. With its competition gone, that lucky mutant could populate, giving rise to a newly resistant colony overnight.

Since bacteria can grow remarkably quickly, eliminating all but a small number just means that the new population boom will come from those few, resistant, ancestors. But that is not the only reason bacteria are so challenging to fight. They have been around billions or years and have survived because they can adapt well. Bacteria, in fact, can get their genes from distantly related bacteria. So if one bacteria gains immunity another bacteria can get that immunity by getting genes from that other bacteria (seems like science fiction but it is actually science fact).

Surprising New Diabetes Data

But these measures are only surrogates for disease. And in many cases, the connection between “better” numbers and better health is tenuous. In the case of cholesterol, many people won’t see a health benefit from lower numbers.

Now comes yet another sobering reminder that lowering a surrogate marker doesn’t necessarily bring better health. On Feb. 6, the National Institutes of Health announced it was halting a key trial for diabetes. Researchers had hoped the trial, dubbed ACCORD (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), would show that more aggressive lowering of blood sugar would significantly reduce deaths. Instead, the opposite happened. More people in the intensive treatment group died than in the group getting standard care. “A thorough review of the data shows that the medical treatment strategy of intensively reducing blood sugar below current clinical guidelines causes harm in these…patients,” says Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute.

Scientific study often results in less than clear conclusions, especially in complex systems. There is great difficulty understanding what is actually going on, what interactions are present, what factors are significant, etc.. One of the great problems with the low level of scientific literacy in the USA is so many people think science is about simple absolute truth.

Scientific inquiry, especially related to health care, must attempt to gain insights from confusing signals. To gain scientific literacy one must understand basics concepts, like data is a proxy for what you aim to understand. To understand yourself you need to accept that science is not math. For a long time we are going to have to do our best to build up our understanding of human health (and other complex systems) as best we can. We need to be able to sort out what are solid conclusion, what are guesses, what seem like reasonable explanation and what level of confidence we can have in statements.

It is not enough to learn facts we need to be able to think scientifically and comprehend the subtleties surrounding the advances in scientific understanding. Some criticize newspapers and popular science for providing too simplistic a view of new scientific knowledge. While this can be a problem I really see the problem much more serious if people read obviously overly simplistic articles and don’t understand that it is just scratching the surface. The reader needs to take responsibility too. I enjoy many great articles that gloss over many of the details but provide a quick view of intriguing new breakthroughs.

Fighting Tuberculosis

Signaling an End to TB by Kathleen M. Wong

Once routinely treated with cheap antibiotics, TB is poised to make a terrifying comeback. More and more, doctors in developing nations are finding patients infected with strains of TB invulnerable to all but a handful of extremely expensive, exotic drugs. Worldwide, TB already infects one in every three people and sickens one in ten. Without new methods to stop the spread of drug-resistant strains, the cost of treating this ancient human pathogen could bankrupt even the most prosperous economies.
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TB could, in theory, develop resistance to this new class of drugs, too. But Alber thinks he can skew the odds to favor humans. Identifying a drug capable of knocking out several TB enzymes at once could make it next to impossible for the bacterium to evolve resistance on multiple fronts.

Though TB is a daunting foe, Alber remains confident about the prospects of beating the disease. “As a bacterium, it should be easier to treat than HIV or malaria. Those kinds of diseases-caused by viruses and protozoans-we generally don’t know how to cure,” Alber says. “From a scientific perspective, TB is a simpler problem.”

Good luck, it may be easier but it still isn’t easy. Related: Tuberculosis Risk – ‘Virtually untreatable’ TB – Extensively Drug-resistant Tuberculosis (XDR TB) – TB Pandemic Threat

Lifestyle Drugs and Risk

I see taking drugs as risky. Certain drug have long histories and seem safe and even seem to have positive side effect like Aspirin (though even it is not without risks – see below). Even if a drug has a good chance of a positive result in treating some medical condition – assuming it is otherwise safe is not wise. I believe you have have a significant positive known benefit to consider taking drugs given the unknown problems that are likely to be lurking. I find the pop a pill culture for anything that might be a minor annoyance to be foolish – taking risks without consideration. Taking drugs entails taking a risk and the more you take the risks of interactions and cumulative effects increase the risks to you. Business Week (somewhat surprising given the huge amount drug makers pay to advertise lifestyle drugs) has a decent article pointing out some of the foolishness involved in the Lifestyle Drug Binge:

The renewed excitement is most evident in four treatment areas that account for the bulk of lifestyle-drug sales: weight loss, hair loss, sleep, and sexual dysfunction.

This trend is surprising because such treatments can expose patients to risks, sparking criticism of drug companies at a time when patient safety is already under a spotlight. Lifestyle drugs are defined loosely as products used to treat conditions that are not life-threatening. Because people take them over long periods of time, sometimes on a daily basis, they may be more dangerous than they first appear.

We have found amazingly helpful and useful drugs. This is great. But people need to remember these drugs are not without potential negative consequences. Take advantage of them when appropriate but don’t forget the risks each instance has for negative side effects. Related: health care improvement articles – health care blog posts
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