December 1, 2006, 4:31 AM CT

Huntington's And Abnormal Cholesterol Levels In Brain

Mayo Clinic researchers have discovered a protein interaction that may explain how the deadly Huntington's disease affects the brain. The findings, published in and featured on the cover of the current issue of Human Molecular Genetics, show how the mutated Huntington's protein interacts with another protein to cause dramatic accumulation of cholesterol in the brain.

"Cholesterol is essential for promoting the connection network among brain cells and in maintaining their membrane integrity. Both the level of cholesterol and its delivery to the proper locations in the cell are essential for the survival of neurons," explains Mayo Clinic molecular biologist Cynthia McMurrary, Ph.D.

"Our discovery that the mutant Huntington's disease protein derails the cholesterol delivery system and causes cholesterol accumulation in neurons provides us with key results and solid clues to the mechanism of this disease," says Dr. McMurray. "Fully understanding the mechanism of toxicity is the key to developing treatments".

Huntington's disease -- sometimes called Huntington's chorea or St. Vitus' dance -- is a progressive, degenerative condition that causes nerve cells in the brain to waste away. Symptoms include uncontrolled movements, emotional disturbances and mental deterioration.........

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November 30, 2006, 4:50 AM CT

Finding Cause And Cure For Asthma

A $7.7 million grant will establish a new center for asthma research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Directed by Michael J. Holtzman, M.D., the Selma and Herman Seldin Professor of Medicine, the center will investigate the causes of asthma to develop new treatments for the disease. The center's funding comes from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health.

Named the Asthma and Allergic Diseases Cooperative Research Center, the center will conduct research specifically focused on how the body's protective mechanism, the immune system, contributes to asthma.

"Normally, immunity is under tight control," says Holtzman, who directs the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine. "But if the immune response goes too far, it can cause inflammatory diseases like asthma".

Previous research showed that viral infections of the lungs at an early age could trigger long-term asthma. The scientists will test children with respiratory infections, measuring their body's response to the virus, and they will follow their respiratory health for five years.

"We will look at the cell biology and the biochemistry of the children's response to respiratory virus infection," Holtzman says. "We know the more severe the infection is, the more likely a patient is to develop asthma later. We want to know at the cell level what determines the severity of the infection and how we can intervene to prevent asthma".........

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November 30, 2006, 4:28 AM CT

Seven-point System Gauges Seriousness Of Heart Failure

simple points system may soon help guide treatment of elderly heart failure patients. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that by counting how many of seven easy-to-obtain health factors a patient has, physicians can estimate the patient's risk of dying.

The points system may steer doctors toward considering more aggressive treatments such as implantable defibrillators and pacemakers for those at low risk of death. However, elderly patients with a high risk may want to avoid stressful and unnecessary medical intervention and may benefit most from palliative or hospice care.

"It has typically been very difficult to predict how long a person hospitalized with heart failure may survive," says senior author Michael W. Rich, M.D., associate professor of medicine and a geriatric cardiologist at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. "That has made it hard for the treating doctor to know how aggressive to be with therapy".

Heart failure afflicts about 5 million people in the United States, hospitalizing more than a million patients each year. The incidence of heart failure increases with age, and with people 65 and older becoming the fastest growing segment of the population, the personal and financial burden of heart failure will likely increase.........

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November 29, 2006, 4:59 AM CT

Health Inequalities Are A Growing Problem

Global health inequalities are substantial, growing, and influenced by economic, social and health-sector variables as well as geography, a study concludes in the recent issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Especially disturbing findings from this study are that countries with high mortality in young children are making slow progress, gaps in adult mortality are becoming wider, and countries with the highest adult mortality have reversed their trend from mortality reduction, said lead author Jennifer Prah Ruger, assistant professor of public health in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Medicine.

This is the first systematic study of global inequalities in adult and child mortality to identify three distinct mortality groupsbetter off, worse-off and mid-levelusing cluster analysis methods to reveal new associations and structure in data, and examine the underlying risk factors linked to inequality in mortality. Unlike prior studies, this research focuses on gaps in health inequalities between countries, Ruger said.

The probability that a child will die before age five and an adult will die at an early age are disproportionately higher throughout sub-Saharan Africa and Afghanistan than in countries in any other geographic region, as per the study. The authors report that these countries have lower average incomes, more extreme poverty, higher inflation and less trade. They also have lower levels of investment in human and physical resources, more health risk factors and less effective disease prevention, and worse educational outcomes.........

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November 26, 2006, 7:15 AM CT

Reversing Type 1 Diabetes In Mice

New data published in the Nov. 24 issue of Science provide further support for a protocol to reverse type 1 diabetes in mice and new evidence that adult precursor cells from the spleen can contribute to the regeneration of beta cells. In 2001 and 2003, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) demonstrated the efficacy of a protocol to reverse of type 1 diabetes in diabetic mice. Three studies from other institutions published in the March 24, 2006 issue of Science confirmed that the MGH-developed protocol can reverse the underlying disease but were inconclusive on the role of spleen cells in the recovery of insulin-producing pancreatic islets. The new data from a study performed at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published as a technical comment, provides additional confirmation of the ability to reverse type 1 diabetes and on the role of the spleen cells in islet regeneration.

"This data from the NIH and the earlier studies have added significantly to the understanding of how diabetes may be reversed," says Denise Faustman, MD, PhD, director of the Immunobiology Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, primary author of the 2001 and 2003 studies and co-corresponding author of the current report. "It is still early, but it appears that there are multiple potential sources for regenerating islets. As a research community we should pursue all avenues. We're excited to see what will happen in humans".........

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November 20, 2006, 5:08 AM CT

Yeast Model Shows Promise As Alzheimer's Test

A century ago this month, German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer formally described characteristics of the neurodegenerative disease which ultimately came to bear his name. While international efforts to learn about Alzheimer's disease and develop treatments have progressed significantly in recent years, a cure remains an elusive goal.

A new research tool developed by Susan Liebman, distinguished university professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, may ultimately provide a means for treating the earliest stage of Alzheimer's, thereby stemming its progression.

Typically typically alzheimer's disease is characterized by the formation of plaques in the brain largely composed of fibers made from a peptide called beta-amyloid, or A-beta, for short. There is abundant evidence to support the hypothesis that accumulation of A-beta peptide triggers the appearance of Alzheimer's. But while earlier research suggested the A-beta fiber caused Alzheimer's, recent research points at much smaller aggregates of the peptide as the culprit.

"We've developed a yeast model system in which A-beta small aggregate formation can be detected," said Liebman. "The system employs a fusion of the human A-beta peptide to a functional yeast protein, called a reporter protein, which is only active in allowing cells to grow on test media if the fusion does not form aggregates".........

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November 19, 2006, 9:22 PM CT

Women At Higher Risk Of PTSD

Males experience more traumatic events on average than do females, yet females are more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a review of 25 years of research reported in the recent issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

The authors reviewed 290 studies conducted between 1980 and 2005 to determine who is more at risk for potentially traumatic events (PTE) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) males or females? The results of the meta-analysis found that while males have a higher risk for traumatic events, women suffer from higher PTSD rates. PTSD is defined as an anxiety disorder precipitated by a traumatic event and characterized by symptoms of re-experiencing the trauma, avoidance and numbing and hyperarousal.

From the review, researchers David F. Tolin, PhD of the Institute of Living and Edna B. Foa, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that female study participants were more likely than male study participants to have experienced sexual assault and child sexual abuse, but less likely to have experienced accidents, nonsexual assaults, witness death or injury, disaster or fire and combat or war. Sexual trauma, the authors conclude, may cause more emotional suffering and are more likely to contribute to a PTSD diagnosis than other types of trauma.........

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November 15, 2006, 5:03 AM CT

Obesity An Advantage In Hemodialysis Patients

Despite significant improvements in dialysis therapys, currently over 20% of the 350,000 maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients in the United States die each year. A study published in Hemodialysis International finds that this high mortality rate may be attributed to malnutrition.

MHD patients experience what has been termed the "obesity paradox," wherein obesity is linked to increased chance of survival. "A larger body fat mass as seen in obesity probably represents protective reserves that may mitigate the adverse effects of malnutrition in patients," as per Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh M.D., author of the study.

MHD patients tend to have a high degree of protein-energy malnutrition and inflammation. The combination of these two conditions, termed Kidney Disease Wasting (KDW), leads to increased risk of death. On the other hand, it has been shown that an increase in protein intake yields the greatest survival in patients.

The study suggests that improved diet as well as appetite-stimulating agents may be a way to improve nutrition and, consequently, outcome in MHD patients. Understanding the factors that lead to KDW will be the key to improving survival in MHD patients, as well as in the 20 to 40 million Americans who exhibit similar risk-factor paradoxes such as those with chronic heart failure, AIDS, rheumatoid arthritis and malignancy.........

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November 7, 2006, 7:12 PM CT

Enzyme To Treat Diabetic Kidney Disease

Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine scientists have observed that an enzyme called ACE2 may hold the potential to treat diabetic kidney disease, the most common form of kidney disease.

In the laboratory, scientists led by Daniel Batlle, professor of medicine in the Feinberg School, chief of the nephrology/high blood pressure division and staff nephrologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, have found low levels of the ACE2 enzyme in the glomeruli of the kidneys of diabetic mice. When ACE2 was further decreased with an inhibitor drug, kidney disease worsened. Studies are now needed using compounds that increase the level of ACE2 in the kidneys of diabetic mice to see if it reverses or prevents kidney disease from developing, Batlle said.

The experiments appear in a report by Ye et. al in the recent issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

Diabetes, which affects 230 million people worldwide and 21 million in the United States, is the leading cause of kidney failure. About one-third of patients with diabetes will go on to develop kidney disease. In diabetes, the small blood vessels in the kidneys are injured and the kidneys cannot clean the blood properly. In 2002, a total of 153,000 people in the U.S. with kidney failure due to diabetes were living on chronic dialysis or with a kidney transplant.........

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November 7, 2006, 4:50 AM CT

More Hemodialysis May Improve Survival

A study recently published in Hemodialysis International found that more frequent hemodialysis treatments (five or more weekly) can significantly increase the survival rate of patients suffering from irreversible kidney failure. Typical treatment in the U.S. generally involves three sessions weekly.

The study examines the mortality rate of 117 U.S. patients. Those receiving five or more treatments per week were shown to have a 61% better chance of survival when compared to patients receiving conventional treatment.

"More frequent hemodialysis has been shown to improve patient well-being, reduce symptoms during and between treatments and have beneficial effects on clinical outcomes," according to Christopher R. Blagg M.D., lead researcher of the study.

U.S. hemodialysis patients continue to have a high annual mortality rate, despite many improvements in dialysis and overall medical care. Increasing the frequency of dialysis may be an effective means of improving patient survival.........

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