New Treatments For Type 2 Diabetes

Diabetes is said to affect more than 220 million people all over the world, with type 2 diabetes, known as late-onset diabetes, comprising 90% of the statistics. Type 2 diabetes develops later in life when body tissues become resistant to insulin.


In a study involving 125,000 volunteers, scientists discovered a set of genes responsible in controlling the body's reaction to blood glucose.


According to Edinburgh University geneticist Jim Wilson, the discovery of nine new genes associated with type 2 diabetes can help develop new therapies for the condition. In five to 10 years from now, scientists are looking forward to easily identify which persons are genetically susceptible to develop type 2 diabetes. They are also hoping that new treatments will be available to prevent the onset of the disease. Genes influencing blood sugar levels and insulin levels are those included in the nine new genes, with a subset linked to diabetes itself.


Contributed By: Monch Bravante

Treating Urinary Incontinence

When we drink, we pee. However, there's more to urine than just the drink we had earlier. We urinate in order to get rid of the toxins, waste, and excess water that our body doesn't need. Urinary control is a function of the smooth muscle tissue of the urethra and bladder in coordination with the skeletal muscle and the autonomic nervous system.

When muscles of the bladder become too weak or too active, urinary incontinence occurs. There are two types of urinary incontinence:

Stress incontinence – loss of bladder control may happen when you laugh, sneeze, or lift heavy objects.

Urge incontinence – overactive bladder makes you feel like going to the bathroom even if you have little urine in your bladder.

Causes of urinary incontinence may be congenital or acquired disorders, such as prostate problems and nerve damage.

In addition to medication, treatment includes simple exercises, special devices and procedures, depending on your lifestyle. A relatively new procedure in treating men with incontinence resulting from prostate cancer treatment is the Male Sling. It's an out-patient procedure that can take less than half an hour to one hour. This minimally invasive procedure allows men to regain urinary control.


Contributed By: Monch Bravante

Play Attention: A New Treatment For ADHD

We all know that Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD is a common childhood illness considered to be a neuro-behavioral developmental disorder. While regarded as a childhood disease, ADHD can continue throughout adulthood. Many adults with ADHD have developed coping mechanisms. However, many aspects of our daily living becomes difficult due to ADHD symptoms.

In the UK, a new thought-operated computer system aimed to reduce the symptoms of ADHD in children will be rolled out this month. The system, called Play Attention, is supplied by Games for Life, a non-profit community interest company. It allows kids to play a fun educational computer game using a helmet just like a typical bicycle helmet. This helmet picks up the brain activity related to attention, and controlling the game depends on the child's concentration. It stops the moment the attention waivers.

In a study involving 10 kids, researchers learned that the kids' impulsive behavior was reduced compared to a control group who had not used the system. According to Professor Karen Pine at the University of Hertfordshire's School of Psychology and assistant Farjana Nasrin, the Play Attention method may prevent long-term problems by helping the children to be less impulsive and more self-controlled.


Contributed By: Monch Bravante

Immunotherapy Proving Effective Against Melanoma

Some people may not be aware of it, but the skin is the largest organ in the body. Its purpose is to cover and protect the different organs inside the body. Without it, the muscles, bones, and other organs will be exposed. We need the skin to hold everything together. That is why when something happens to our skin, we could be in real jeopardy.


Skin cancer is the most common form of all cancers. And melanoma is a skin cancer that is considered a deadly disease. While it only accounts for less than five percent of all skin cancers, it is the one responsible for more than 75% of skin cancer deaths.


The good news, however, is that new forms of treatment are underway which make use of the body's immune system to attack the cancer cells. While immunotherapy has had a limited role in treating cancer, it shows great potential as far as treatment for melanoma is concerned.


Survival rates for melanoma are low because it does not respond well to traditional radiation and chemotherapy once it has spread. But in rare cases, melanoma simply goes away which make scientists believe is due to an immune reaction against the cancer.

New Modes Of Chronic Pain Relief

In the past, many have actually believed that “chronic pain is all in the head.” However, today's pain specialists understand how the sensation of pain occurs. According to Rollin M. Gallagher, MD, MPH, director of pain management at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, the nervous system, including the spinal cord, interacts with the brain to create the sensation of pain.

Learning how to manipulate the neurotransmitter system paved the way for new modes of chronic pain relief, antidepressants, and other drugs that work with specific brain chemicals that affect emotions and help with the perception of pain.

Advances in MRI imaging allow researchers to demonstrate that the changes are very real in the brain, showing exactly where the sensation of pain is occurring in the brain when it is activated by stimuli. MRI imaging clearly shows the effects of pain on emotion, and vice versa.

These insights help pain specialists to develop treatments that attack moderate-to-severe chronic pain from different angles -- innovative drugs, targeted nerve-zapping procedures, and drug pumps that deliver strong painkillers to the nerve root.

Adding Chemo to Tamoxifen Helps Some Breast Cancer Patients

Adding chemotherapy to traditional cancer-suppressing tamoxifen can increase survival in postmenopausal women with the most normal type of breast cancer, known as estrogen receptor-positive, also it's best given before the tamoxifen regimen starts, according to a new study.
"Chemotherapy with Adriamycin adds to your survival benefit over and above what tamoxifen would do if you are postmenopausal and have the positive lymph nodes and estrogen receptor-positive cancer [the most common type]," explained Dr. Kathy Albain, the lead researcher and professor of medicine at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.
And in another study, Albain found that screening breast tumors with an available multi-gene test spots patients who may not need this form of chemotherapy, despite fitting the standard profile.
Both studies are published online Dec. 10, the first in the journal The Lancet and the second in The Lancet Oncology. Albain is also due to present her findings Thursday at the annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in San Antonio, Texas.
In estrogen receptor-positive cancer, tumor cells carry many receptors on their surfaces to which estrogen can attach, fueling tumor growth. Tamoxifen works by blocking the receptors.
Experts have long debated whether women with estrogen receptor-positive cancers -- whose growth is fueled by circulating estrogen -- would get more benefit from having a chemotherapy regimen on top of tamoxifen.
Albain led a research team from multiple centers that followed nearly 1,500 breast cancer patients for up to 13 years, with a median (half longer, half less) of nearly nine years. All were past menopause and had hormone receptor-positive cancer that had spread to at least one lymph node in the armpit area.
Albain's team assigned 381 women to tamoxifen alone, 587 to chemotherapy alone and 590 to both, with some receiving tamoxifen and chemo together and some in a sequential manner.
Tamoxifen was taken daily for five years. The chemo regimen used is called CAF, for "cyclophosphamide, Adriamycin and 5-fluorouracil."
In all, after accounting for study dropouts, 1,460 women received treatment.
The combined treatments of chemo plus tamoxifen increased the women's disease-free survival by 24 percent, Albain found. When her team looked at which delivery protocol worked best -- simultaneous tamoxifen and chemotherapy or chemo followed by tamoxifen -- the sequential approach was found to be better, giving slightly better disease-free survival.
Ten-year disease-free survival estimates were 57 percent for the combination group and 48 percent for the tamoxifen-only group, the researchers found.
However, women receiving chemo were more likely to have drops in white blood cells, important for fighting infections, the team noted. And they were also more prone to blood clots, congestive heart failure and other complications.
In a second study, Albain's team analyzed whether a gene test, called Oncotype DX, could predict which women would benefit from chemotherapy. Genomic Health, which makes the test, helped fund the study, along with the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
The test, which Albain said is already widely used, is done on the tumor itself. "This puts 21 genes together and comes up with a score," she said. The score -- low, intermediate, high -- predicts the risk of recurrence over 10 years if a woman used tamoxifen alone.
When the researchers performed the test on 367 specimens, they found a low score identified those women who may not need the chemo, despite the fact that they have cancer that spread to lymph nodes.
"This is a positive study, there's no question," said Dr. Joanne Mortimer, vice chair of medical oncology for the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif., of the first study. "This study tells us [that] if you have positive lymph nodes [and are postmenopausal with estrogen receptor-positive cancer], you should have both chemo and tamoxifen, because the survival was better."
But, she added, "when you give everyone [who has the estrogen receptor-positive, node-positive breast cancer] chemotherapy, probably there are some who don't need it."
According to Mortimer, that's why the gene test looks promising -- it may spare some women from having to have chemo while ensuring that those who will benefit from the treatment get it.
More information
To learn more about breast cancer, visit the American Cancer Society.

New type of vaccine against allergies.

This may be the final effect of research at Uppsala University in Sweden. New result is presented by Ms. Anna Ledin in her doctoral dissertation. She vaccinated animals like dogs and rats against their own IgE antibodies, and appears that their allergic symptoms reduce.

The new type of antibody called IgE is part of the body’s defense against parasites, but today it is best known for its key role in allergic reactions. IgE is what brings about an allergic reaction. Normally it constitutes 0.02 % of all antibodies in the blood, but people with allergies can have up to ten times as much. The best way for a person with allergies to avoid reactions is to avoid the substance that triggers the allergies. But if you are allergic to pollen it is not easy to avoid all the pollen produced by blossoming birch trees, for example, which can lead to asthma, hay fever, and/or eczema.

Anna Ledin belongs to a team of scientists at Uppsala University that is developing vaccines against allergies, under the direction of Professor Lars Hellman. Her dissertation is part of this project. She presents a new form of treatment for allergies in her study. By producing and injecting an IgE vaccine that looks like IgE, she demonstrates that the body perceives the vaccine as something alien. Antibodies are then produced to fight both IgE and the vaccine, bringing down the levels of IgE in the blood and reducing the allergic symptoms. The allergy vaccine has been tested on rats and dogs, and the results indicate a clear reduction of IgE levels after vaccination. Dogs are one of the few animals that have allergic reactions like humans, but it has been unclear just how IgE levels are related to their symptoms. A new method for monitoring IgE levels in the blood of dogs was developed by the research team, and it was found that dogs have extremely high levels of IgE, regardless of whether they were healthy or had allergic eczema, autoimmune disorders, or skin parasites. This makes it problematic to diagnose allergies merely on the basis of IgE from dog blood. What’s more, IgE was measured from three sets of puppies, and, unlike mature dogs, the puppies evinced low levels of IgE.

What causes allergies then? It is certain that both environmental and genetic factors play a role. But it has not been determined exactly which genes are involved or to what extent they are involved. Therefore Anna Ledin and the research team examined how a part of one chromosome, containing many different genes, is involved in the regulation of IgE in rats. That particular chromosomal region has previously been implicated in the susceptibility of rats to developing pain in their joints in a model for arthritic rheumatism, and they found that it also affects IgE levels in rats. It remains to be studied whether this chromosomal region also impacts IgE levels in humans.