                  |
 Net World Directory Your personal directory for the internet | ||
| Net World Directory: Archives of health blog |
 | ||
Archives Of Health Blog From NetworlddirectorySubscribe To Health Blog RSS Feed 
No advantage for four-drug antiretroviral regimen
Roy M. Gulick, M.D., M.P.H., of Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, presented the findings of the study today at a JAMA media briefing at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto. The current standard of care for initial therapy of human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) infection is a three-drug antiretroviral regimen, which can suppress viremia (presence of HIV in the blood), increase CD4 cell counts, delay clinical progression, and improve survival, as per background information in the article. Some scientists have suggested that adding drugs to the 3-drug regimens could improve antiretroviral activity. However, additional drugs increase complexity, the potential for toxicity, and costs, and previous studies comparing 3- and 4-drug antiretroviral regimens have shown inconsistent results. Dr. Gulick and his colleagues conducted a study to determine whether a 4-drug regimen would demonstrate better antiretroviral activity than the standard 3-drug regimen. The AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) A5095 study included 765 HIV-1infected patients who had not previously received therapy for HIV-1. The trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, with enrollment and follow-up conducted from March 2001 to March 2005. The study participants received either the medications zidovudine/lamivudine plus efavirenz (3-drug regimen) or zidovudine/lamivudine/abacavir plus efavirenz (4-drug regimen)......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Routine Screening Not Always Beneficial
"Eventhough there are tests to find out whether a child with Down syndrome has celiac disease before the child develops symptoms, early therapy does not appear to improve the child's quality of life or improve outcomes from one of the long-term consequences of celiac disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma," said Nancy Swigonski, M.D., M.P.H., the study's first author and an associate professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and affiliated scientist of the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. Celiac disease is a genetic autoimmune disorder that damages the small intestine and interferes with absorption of nutrients from food. Individuals with celiac disease cannot tolerate gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye, and barley. Untreated celiac disease is thought to increase the risk of intestinal lymphoma......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Bisphosphonates In Treatment Of Multiple Myeloma
"It was imperative that we address the issue that has been under recent intense debate due to patient safety concerns," said Martha Lacy, M.D., Mayo Clinic hematologist and lead author of the statement. "These drugs have far-ranging effects that raised concerns in the medical field, so we brought together the relevant specialists to develop a set of best practice recommendations. We published them in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in order to provide other physicians the benefit of our shared knowledge". The Mayo Clinic team provided recommendations for the myeloma patients for whom bisphosphonates are indicated. They said pamidronate should be the bisphosphonate of choice for patients who are starting therapy, over the newer, more potent drug zoledronic acid, which is more frequently associated with serious damage to jaw bones. Also in the interest of safety, the team recommended that patients without active disease stop bisphosphonate therapy after two years, and patients with active disease reduce the frequency at which the drugs are given......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Parental Time And Childhood Obesity
The study found that the amounts and quality of time parents spent with their children has a direct effect on children's rates of obesity, said Dr. Alex McIntosh, lead researcher. McIntosh is professor of sociology with a research appointment from Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. The U.S. Department of Agriculture study, "Parental Time, Role Strain and Children's Fat Intake and Obesity-Related Outcomes," was published in June. In general, researchers found the amount of time a mother spent with her child, her work stress and her income level had a larger impact in lowering the child's risk of obesity than the father's time, work stress and income, McIntosh said. Furthermore, the more time a mother spends with the child, the less likely that child is to be obese; conversely, the more time a father spends with a child, the more likely the child will be obese, he said. "The impacts were greater for 9- to 11-year-old children than for 13- to 15-year-old children," he added. As a sociologist, McIntosh has long wondered how parents influence their children's nutritional habits, he said......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Never marrieds has highest risk of early death
The findings are based on national census and death certification data, involving almost 67,000 adults in the USA between 1989 and 1997. In 1989, almost one in two of the sample were married, and almost one in 10 were widowed. Around 12% were divorced and 3% were separated. Of the remainder, 5% were cohabiting, and one in five had never been married. Unsurprisingly, older age and poor health were the strongest predictors of death by 1997, but a surviving marriage was also strongly associated with a longer life. After taking into account age, state of health, and several other factors likely to influence the findings, those who had been widowed were almost 40% more likely to die between 1989 and 1997. Those who had been divorced or separated were 27% more likely to have done so. But those who had never been married were 58% more likely to have died during this period than their peers who were married and living with their spouse in 1989. The never married "penalty" was larger for those in very good or excellent health, and smallest for those in poor health, and it was greater among men than women......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Blocking Human HIV Transmissions
HIV-1 often mutates quickly to overcome antiviral compounds designed to prevent infections. But a research team led by Associate Professor Alexander Cole of UCF's Burnett College of Biomedical Sciences has demonstrated that over 100 days the virus develops only weak resistance to retrocyclin, a defense peptide still found in monkeys and lower primates. If additional laboratory tests demonstrate only weak resistance, Cole will study how retrocyclin could be developed into a drug designed to prevent the HIV virus from entering human cells. Cole is also working with Henry Daniell, a UCF professor of molecular biology and microbiology, to develop a way to grow retrocyclin through genetically engineered tobacco plants. The retrocyclin gene would be incorporated into the chloroplast genome of tobacco cells before the plants grow. Daniell has developed a similar approach to growing anthrax vaccine in tobacco plants. An inexpensive way to produce the drug with only a small amount of tobacco would help to make it accessible in areas such as Southeast Asia, Africa and the Caribbean where the disease spreads most quickly......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Behaviors That Can Lead To Poor Health
A study published in the August 2006 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health found lower levels of body satisfaction among teenagers can predict the use of unhealthy weight control behaviors, which can lead to weight gain and poorer overall health. Teenage girls who weren't satisfied with their bodies were more likely to binge eat, participate in less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, take diet pills, and induce vomiting five years later. Adolescent boys with low body satisfaction were also more prone to these unhealthy habits and more likely to start smoking in the future. In contrast, teenagers with a positive body image were more likely to take care of themselves through healthy eating and exercise. "This study shows that teens who have negative feelings about their bodies don't turn to healthy weight management," said Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., lead author and professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. "Instead, they use weight control behaviors that put them at a higher risk for obesity and poor health down the road. With this in mind, interventions with teens should strive to boost self-confidence so they will want to take care of themselves the right way"......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Social Stresses Overlooked
"While older adults may receive adequate medical and psychiatric care, they rarely receive the care necessary to deal with the general 'problems with living,' or social stresses. These psychosocial problems, such as isolation and family stress, may exacerbate psychiatric problems, depression in particular, and contribute to functional decline". Just as the quality of medical care has become a major national concern, the quality of mental health care has become a primary focus of the Institute of Medicine and other national policy groups. In a new study published in the current issue of The Journal of Behavioral Health Services & Research (Vol. 33), Proctor and colleagues examined the quality of follow-up care for 186 patients discharged from the geropsychiatric unit of a large urban hospital after treatment for depression......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source Nutrition's Role In Genes And Birth Defects
Scientists used transparent fish embryos to develop a way to discover how genes and diet interact to cause birth defects. "By the time most women know they are pregnant, the development of the fetus' organs is essentially complete," said Bryce Mendelsohn, co-author and an M.D./Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program at Washington University School of Medicine. "Since we currently do not understand the interaction between genetics and nutrition, the goal of this research was to understand how the lack of a specific nutrient, in this case copper, interacts with an embryo's genetics during early development". Mendelsohn is doing the research in the laboratory of Jonathan D. Gitlin, M.D., the Helene B. Roberson Professor of Pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine, director of genetics and genomic medicine at St. Louis Children's Hospital and scientific director of the Children's Discovery Institute. Mendelsohn and collaborators Stephen L. Johnson, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics at the School of Medicine, and graduate student Chunyue Yin, working with Lila Solnica-Krezel, associate professor of biology at Vanderbilt University, studied the impact of copper metabolism on the development of zebrafish, a vertebrate that develops similarly to humans. Zebrafish have become staples of genetic research because the transparent embryos grow outside of the mother's body, which allows development to be easily observed......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source New Learning Strategy
In the Thoroughman laboratory, volunteers play games on a computer screeen using a robotic arm so that Thoroughman and his colleagues can study how people learn motor skills.
In so doing, Kurt Thoroughman, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Washington University, and his graduate student, Michael Fine, have discovered a new learning strategy they call categorical adaptation in which steps of learning are sensitive to the direction of error, but do not scale proportionally with the size of the error. Eventually, their findings could have an impact in the rehabilitation of people with neurological ailments such as strokes by making use of different learning environments. If you make a movement error in one direction, in makes sense that your next movement would correct toward the opposite direction, in exact proportion to the error. An example would be a pitcher correcting to the right, after missing home plate to the left with a pitch. "We show that learning does not necessarily scale with error," said Thoroughman. "I think we have uncovered a part of human adaptation that certainly doesn't do that. We are not claiming that all prior theories are false in the behaviors that were captured. It's just that we have for the first time found a part of human adaptation that clearly does not scale with the size of the error"......... Posted by: Sean Permalink Source |
||
| Net World Directory: Navigation |