Another strike against stress
IRVINE
,
CA
- SeniorSource e-zine stated a discovery was made in the study of Alzheimer's disease. One factor in the cause is said to be stress. Professor of neurobiology and behavior Frank LaFerla and his scientific team at the
University
of
California
made the discovery using genetically-modified mice. The team injected the mice for seven days with a compound similar to the stress hormones in humans. The protein beta-amyloid increased in the brain 60 times. This protein is one main cause of plaques in the human brain. Plaques are one if the two lesions that cause Alzheimer's. Scientists noted higher levels of Tau protein. Tau leads to tangles that are the other brain lesion symptom of Alzheimer's. The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Stress plays a major role in human health. Heart disease, sleep disorders, weight gain, diabetes, and many other common ailments have all been found to have links to stress, or are improved when stress is reduced. Stress can be reduced, and add many other positive benefits to daily living.
ROCKVILLE
,
MD
- A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel unanimously urged okay of the first of a new class of HIV-suppressing medications, HealthDay News disclosed. Pfizer Inc.'s maraviroc is among agents called
CCR
5 antagonists. The panel backed drug approval for those already taking other anti-HIV medicines. Pfizer would sell the drug under the brand name Celsentri. The panel felt the drug's benefits outweigh its risks, and while FDA doesn’t have to follow panel advice, it usually does. "The drug is needed by a certain portion of the population, and I think benefits and risks clearly support its approval as soon as possible,'' said Peter Havens, panel member and professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Jeffrey Laurence, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Virus Research at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, added, "It attacks part of the way HIV binds to a cell. It looks spectacular in Phase II and Phase
III
testing in terms of lowering virus loads and increasing CD4 T-cell counts."
LEXINGTON
,
KY
- Rural hospital stroke patients can get safe, effective treatment with a clot-busting drug when a doctor at a larger hospital is on the telephone guiding treatment. The findings are important to conquer barriers to optimal stroke care in rural settings, data given at the
American
Academy
of Neurology's annual meeting revealed. "Expert guidance of this treatment … appears to be safe, practical, and effective," said study author Dr. Anand Vaishnav, of the University of Kentucky Medical Center. The study evaluated 121 stroke patients treated with drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) at a rural hospital by a stroke neurologist on the telephone guiding treatment; tPA is the only approved treatment for acute ischemic stroke, and must be given within three hours of stroke. The study found it took an average 132 minutes from stroke onset to start telephone-guided tPA treatment at a rural hospital. "This is less than the average 144 minutes it took from stroke onset to tPA treatment in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke tPA study, a large national study published in 1995," said Dr. Vaishnav. "We had lower rates of bleeding in the brain and death than the original NINDS study." Nearly half of rural patients treated with tPA by telephone went home after an average hospital stay of four days.
NEW
HAVEN, CT - MedPage Today noted older Americans are flocking to gastroenterologists due to Medicare's all-beneficiary coverage of colonoscopy screening. That pays off in earlier colon cancer detection, a study found. Colonoscopy is up nearly sevenfold since Medicare changed the rules in 2001 to cover all fee-for-service beneficiaries for screening, noted Dr. Cary Gross, of
Yale
Medical
School
, in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There has been a significant shift to colon cancer being detected in the earliest stage, Dr. Gross and colleagues stated. To see if the policy changes were having the intended effect, the team analyzed Medicare data on colonoscopy use 1991-2003. To seek a shift in cancer stage at diagnosis, the team checked data on nearly 45,000 people diagnosed 1992-2002 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Medicare-linked database. Colonoscopy rose from an average of 285 per 100,000 beneficiaries before screening was covered to 889 per 100,000 after coverage was given to high-risk patients.
LOS ANGELES - MedPage Today noted telltale plaques and tangles of even mild cognitive impairment can be detected by brain PET scans aided by a new chemical marker, scientists said. A PET scan aided by FDDNP that binds to Alzheimer's amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles distinguished patients with mild cognitive impairment from those with Alzheimer's or from control patients, UCLA investigators stated in the New England Journal of Medicine. "This is the first time this pattern of plaque and tangle has been tracked in living humans over time," said Dr. Gary Small, and colleagues. Non-invasive methods of detecting these abnormal proteins potentially are useful in markers for drug development aimed at blocking amyloid build-up and for diagnostics, the team added. The study enrolled 83 volunteers with self-reported memory problems who had had neurologic and psychiatric studies and PET scanning. After cognitive testing, 25 volunteers were deemed to have Alzheimer's, 28 having mild cognitive impairment, and 30 as healthy controls.
OXFORD
,
ENGLAND
- MedPage Today disclosed more women than men inherit a propensity for ischemic stroke, regardless of usual vascular risk factors, scientists found. Women who had a stroke or transient ischemic attack were more likely than men to have a history of stroke in mothers than fathers and sisters than brothers, noted online Lancet Neurology. The age at stroke in patients and affected siblings correlated with age at stroke of a mother but not a father, said Drs. Peter Rothwell and Emmanuel Touzé, of the Radcliffe Infirmary. Findings came from a study of strokes in mother, father, and other first-degree relatives of men and women with ischemic stroke or TIA in the Oxford Vascular Study, which assessed all incident or recurrent TIAs and strokes among 91,106 patients registered with 63 family physicians in Oxfordshire. The study included 423 women, 383 men. The women were older, slightly more likely to have had a TIA as a qualifying event, and more likely to have a history of hypertension, to be a lifetime non-smoker, and to have had high mean cholesterol, researchers said. Women were more likely to have at least one affected first-degree relative. Maternal stroke was almost twice as common as paternal stroke.
LOS ANGELES - A UCLA study found physicians discuss cost and obtaining newly-prescribed medications only about 33% of the time in patient/doctor interactions. Questions about pricing and prescription drug insurance coverage are critical - the high cost of drugs, including out-of-pocket co-payments, are linked to patient non-adherence in maintaining dosage schedules, said Dr. Derjung Tarn, assistant professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine and lead author of the study in the American Journal of Managed Care. “Though cost discussions aren’t always necessary, especially if physicians know a patient's financial situation and the best formulary choice for a medication, physicians must have a high level of awareness about medication cost and issues impeding medication acquisition because these can be important barriers to patient medication adherence,” he said.
