No Benefit to Heart from Low Blood Sugar

Aggressively lowering blood sugar levels in diabetics is of no benefit to the heart, two new studies have found. Thus doctors who lower their patients' blood sugar to normal values can expect no reduction in their chances of having a heart attack or stroke.
The research, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine and scheduled to be presented at the scientific meeting of the American Diabetes Association, was initiated because it is already known that high blood sugar levels indeed are linked to many cardiovascular problems. However, it doesn't go both ways: low sugar levels have no cardiovascular benefits. The intensive treatment consists of a mix of diabetes drugs and insulin.
However, even though cardiovascular health is not influenced by the aggressive treatment, kidney health is. The scientists found a 21 percent decrease in kidney problems in patients whose blood sugar was aggressively lowered to normal values.
Diabetes mellitus, usually referred to as diabetes, is a syndrome characterized by disordered metabolism which leads to inappropriately high blood sugar. Specifically, Type 2 Diabetes, which is the most common form, is primarily characterized by insulin resistance, relative insulin deficiency and hyperglycemia. The disease is chronic and progressive and has no clearly established cure.
Treatment focuses only on preservation of quality of life and reduction of mortality and concomitant morbidity from complications.

Wearing Flip-Flops May Have Bad Repercussions on Your Feet

As the summer set in, most people want to feel as free as they can be when it comes to clothes and footwear. And what can be more comfortable during summer walks than flip-flops. However, according to a new study, flip-flops can be very bad for your feet and legs.
Researchers from Auburn University in Alabama recruited 39 college-age men and women and asked them to wear flip-flops or athletic shoes while walking on a special platform. The study found that when participants wore flip-flops, they took shorter strides and their heels hit the ground with less vertical forces than when they wore athletic shoes.
Therefore, wearing flip-flops can result in altering people’s gait, “which may explain why we see some lower leg and foot problems in people who wear these shoes a lot,” study author Justin Shroyer, a graduate student in Auburn’s department of kinesiology said, according to the New York Times.
The results of the study should not discourage people from wearing flip-flops, Shroyer said. However, he added that people should wear them for short periods of time, (especially people with pain in their legs and feet), as this kind of footwear is not designed to properly support the foot and ankle during all-day wear.
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Boy Dies From Secondary Drowning In South Carolina

June 6 2008 - A 10 year old boy named Johnny Jackson has died just hours after leaving a swimming pool in his apartment complex in Goose Creek, and it is believed he died from secondary drowning.
He died several hours after exiting the pool, thus the theory is that he died from secondary drowning from taking in too much water while he was in the pool swimming.
According to the county coroner, Jackson died with water in his lungs resulting in his death via "asphyxiation by drowning."
Speaking with ABC news, his mother Cassandra Jackson said that her son seemed to be fine: "He seemed to be fine," she said. "I noticed nothing out of the ordinary, other than him taking a little bit of water in and coughing and then calming down."
"I rolled him over and his body was very limp and I realized he'd soiled himself again and was very purplish-blue looking," Jackson tells the network. "His
tongue was really swollen, too."
Jonny was reportedly autistic, but this in no shape or form contributed to his death.
His mother says that all mothers should check their children when they come out of the water after swimming: "Please check them when they get out of the pool. Just watch them like a hawk," she told a newspaper. "It tears me up inside. It's a heck of a sacrifice, but if this will help someone else, then it's all worth it."

Indian boffin uncovers vitamin B3’s role in maintaining good cholesterol

Washington, June 6 : A team led by an Indian researcher claim to have uncovered how niacin (vitamin B3) helps in maintaining good cholesterol levels, thus reducing the risk of developing heart disease.
Niacin can increase plasma HDL levels, however, the mechanism of how it works has been mysterious. Some researchers also believed that niacin does not actually increase HDL production.
The work also identifies a new drug target, as no other drug in currently known to raise HDL by inhibiting the surface expression of the beta chain of ATP synthase.
The new study has found that a component of ATP synthase (the protein that makes ATP) is present on the surface of liver cells, and this subunit known as the 'beta chain' can take up HDL.
The team led by researcher Moti Kashyap found that this beta chain is the basis of niacin's effect.
They added niacin to samples of human liver cells and found that treatment reduced the presence of Beta chain on the cell surface by ~27pct, and as a result HDL uptake was reduced by ~35pct.
This shows that niacin hinders the liver from removing HDL from the blood, thus maintaining high plasma HDL levels.
However, it does not affect another major pathway known as "Reverse Cholesterol Transport."
Therefore, it maintains HDL levels while still allowing the removal of other cholesterol types, explaining why niacin is especially beneficial.

25% of South Africans have mental problems

Johannesburg, June 8 : Nearly 25 pct of South Africans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), says a leading psychiatrist.
Dr Eugene Allers, psychiatrist and former-president of the South African Society of Psychiatry (Sasop) revealed that up to six million South Africans suffer from PTSD and the country has become a "breeding ground" for psychiatric problems, reports News24.
Out of the 25 pct, nearly a third of these people are between the 30 and 40 years of age.
It was apparently said that up to 70 pct of people with psychiatric problems had major (serious) depressions.
Allers said that previous research had shown that up to half of people with major depression also had PTSD.
PTSD is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more terrifying events in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. It is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma.
Experts believed that about a quarter to a third of people who were raped, for example, or who witnessed a traumatic incident developed PTSD. The rest process the experience.
Allers said abuse and neglect during a person's childhood could make him more susceptible to developing psychiatric problems.
He said that if for, instance, the South African population was at 50 million people now, a quarter of them would have psychiatric problems, of which 70 pct would be major depression.
Of the people with depression 50pct would fulfil the criteria for PTSD.
He further said that local studies showed that in some communities 58pct to 94pct of children had witnessed incidents of violence. About one out of 5 of these children fulfilled the criteria for PTSD.
There were 350 psychiatrists in the country. Allers said 177 worked full-time, 56 part-time and the rest worked for the state.
The country only had about 2 000 psychotherapists in the private sector but needed many more to be able to help everyone. (ANI)

Brain’s prediction of instant happenings allows timely limb movements

Washington, June 7 : Scientists suggest that it is the ability of the brain to predict what will happen in a very near future that enables people to make timely movements of their limbs.
Richard A. Andersen of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) says that the neurons and neural connections that make up the sensory systems are far too slow to react to a happening in real time.
"Everything we sense is a little bit in the past," he said.
"The brain is generating its own version of the world, a 'forward model', which allows you to know where you actually are in real time. It takes the delays out of the system," he added.
While working with Grant Mulliken of MIT and Sam Musallam of McGill University on a study, he focused on understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of brain process—such as the senses of sight, hearing, balance, and touch, and the neural mechanisms of action.
His lab is working toward the development of implanted neural prosthetic devices that would serve as an interface between severely paralysed individuals' brain signals and their artificial limbs, allowing thoughts to control movement.
Andersen's group focuses on a more high-level area of cortex called the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), which is where sensory stimuli are actually transformed into movement plans.
For their study, the researchers trained two monkeys to use a joystick to move a cursor on a computer screen from a small red circle into a green circle, while keeping their gaze fixed on the red circle.
The monkeys typically generated curved trajectories, but to increase the curvature one monkey was trained to move the cursor around an obstacle, a large blue circle which was placed between the initial location of the cursor and the target circle.
The monkey had to guide the cursor around the obstacle, without touching it, and over to the green circle.
The researchers used electrodes to measure the activity of neurons in the monkey’s PPC as they conducted the tasks, which allowed them to monitor signals—commands for movement—in real time.
According to the research group, it was found that neurons in the PPC produce signals that represent the brain's estimation of the current and upcoming movement of the cursor.
"An internal estimate of the current state of the cursor can be used immediately by the brain to rapidly correct a movement, avoiding having to rely entirely on late-arriving sensory information, which can result in slow and unstable control," said Mulliken.
Andersen said: "The idea is that you feed back the command you make for movement into those areas of the brain that plan the movement (i. e., the PPC). The signal about the movement taking place is adjusted to be perfectly aligned in time with the actual movement--what you're moving in your head matches with what you're moving in the real world."
In their study report, the researchers said that the effect was akin to an athlete visualizing his performance in his mind.
A study recently showed that monkeys could feed themselves using a robotic limb that they controlled only with their thoughts, which were picked up via an array of electrodes sitting on top of the primary motor cortex.
The neural signal driving the robotic limb was what is known as a "trajectory signal", which represents the path that must be taken to move from one point to another, like using a computer mouse to drag an object across a screen.
Andersen says that a different signal in the posterior parietal cortex, called the "goal signal", can also be used to directly jump an object from one point to another.
"This goal signal is much faster for reaching a goal than a trajectory signal. Fast goal decoding is very advantageous for rapid sequences such as typing. Our new study shows that the posterior parietal cortex codes the trajectory as well as the goal, which makes this brain area an attractive target for neural prosthesis. Not only does this increase the versatility and the number of prosthetic applications, but it also makes the decoding easier since the trajectories can be better estimated if the goal is known," he says.
A research article on this work is currently available online, and will be published in a future print issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)

Widening Salmonella Outbreak Prompts Another FDA Tomato Warning

June 8 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. restaurants, retailers and food service operators were warned not to use some raw tomatoes in a widening outbreak of salmonella that increased the number of people who had to be hospitalized, according to the government.
Consumers and retailers across the country should avoid raw red plum, red Roma or round red tomatoes, which have been tied to the 145 infections reported since mid-April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a statement on its Web site.
The cases, including 23 people who required hospital treatment, were reported in states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, the FDA said yesterday in the statement. On June 3, the agency reported 57 cases including 17 requiring hospitalization.
Salmonella infections can cause fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain, according to the statement. Young children, frail and elderly people and those with weakened immune systems are particularly at risk.
Consumers may continue to eat cherry tomatoes, grape tomatoes, tomatoes sold with the vine still attached and tomatoes grown at home, the statement said.
The agency is working with state health regulators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food industry groups and others to determine the source of the outbreak, which ``may be limited to a single grower or packer or tomatoes from a specific geographic area,'' the FDA statement said

Doctor who treated pro wrestler faces more charges

ATLANTA (AP) — The personal doctor to a pro wrestler who killed himself, his wife and their 7-year-old son last year was charged Thursday in a new 175-count federal indictment with conspiracy and improperly dispensing drugs.

The new indictment against Dr. Phil Astin replaces a seven-count indictment last July and involves 17 additional patients. Astin was a doctor for wrestler Chris Benoit. Authorities have said Astin prescribed a 10-month supply of anabolic steroids to Benoit every three to four weeks for a year leading up to the killings.

The indictment alleges that the prescription drugs dispensed by Astin resulted in death or serious bodily injury to one patient. That patient was not named.
Patients in the indictment are referred to in court papers by their initials. Prosecutors would not discuss the initials. However, two entries were initials similar to those of Benoit and his slain wife.

Astin, 52, of Carrollton, is accused of giving the patients hundreds of illegal prescriptions for drugs including methadone, Percocet, Oxycontin, Demerol and Xanax. None of the drugs mentioned were steroids.
U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said the investigation is ongoing.

Astin's lawyer, Natasha Silas, said in an e-mail to The Associated Press that she wasn't surprised by the new indictment, since prosecutors had said they planned to file it.
"Moreover, the addition of the new charges does not in any way alter our commitment to vigorously defend Dr. Astin when the allegations are tested in court," Silas said. "Until he was charged in this case, Dr. Astin was a compassionate country doctor, who provided low cost, and sometimes free, medical care to thousands of people in and around the Carrolton community."
The new indictment alleges that Astin illegally distributed prescription drugs by providing multiple, undated prescriptions, writing prescriptions for inappropriate combinations of drugs, or feeding the methadone addictions of patients for months or even years.
Astin was initially charged with illegal distribution of prescription drugs to two patients other than Benoit. Those charges came after the June 2007 killings at Benoit's suburban Atlanta home.

Authorities said Benoit, 40, strangled his wife with a cord, used a choke hold to strangle his son, placed Bibles next to the bodies and hanged himself on a piece of exercise equipment in their Fayetteville home.

Suspicions linking steroid use to the killings have lingered, since anabolic steroids were found in Benoit's home and tests showed Benoit had roughly 10 times the normal level of testosterone in his system.

Some experts believe using testosterone can contribute to paranoia, depression and violent outbursts known as "roid rage." But authorities have never publicly linked the Benoit killings to steroid use, and Benoit's father believes years of head trauma his son suffered while in the ring contributed to the killings.

Poniard says promising data emphasize drug partner need

CHICAGO, June 1 (Reuters) - Drug development company Poniard Pharmaceuticals Inc (PARD.O: Quote, Profile, Research) reported promising preliminary trial results for a new type of chemotherapy on Sunday, findings it hopes will be strong enough to land a development partner to help finance future studies.

"The ideal partner for us would be a single business with a global reach," Jerry McMahon, the company's chief executive, told Reuters.

Poniard unveiled mid-stage data at a meeting here of the American Society of Clinical Oncology showing that the drug -- a new type of platinum-based chemotherapy -- given in combination with standard chemo drugs 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin, appears to be as effective as the two drugs combined with oxaliplatin for patients with metastatic colorectal cancer.
That is important because oxaliplatin causes some type of nerve pain in 80 percent to 90 percent of patients, leading them to either reduce or abandon treatment, McMahon said.
Early results from the ongoing 100-patient Phase II trial showed that out of 11 evaluated patients on the experimental regimen, 10 achieved disease control. Of 13 evaluated patients on the standard regimen, 10 achieved disease control, including one partial response.

"The data looks very good. It is consistent with our thesis," the CEO said, noting that Poniard has not yet seen a single case of severe neuropathy in colon cancer patients treated with picoplatin.

The company is currently conducting a pivotal trial of the drug in small-cell lung cancer and expects to have picoplatin on the market for that indication in 2010. Poniard also presented at ASCO this weekend data from trials of the drug in prostate and ovarian cancer patients.
"The data at this meeting says there are other trials we need to do ... It makes a lot of sense now that we seek a partner for registrational trials," McMahon said.
He said Poniard would consider a partnership deal prior to receipt of the pivotal lung cancer data if the terms respect the fact that the company will soon have data across a number of oncology indications.

Oxaliplatin, sold by Sanofi Aventis (SASY.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) under the brand name Eloxatin for colorectal cancer, has annual sales of more than $2 billion.
"If the ongoing Phase I/II data show comparable efficacy as oxaliplatin-based regimen, we believe that picoplatin may have a big opportunity in colorectal cancer," Leerink Swann analyst Howard Liang said in a recent research note.