Novel gene therapy hints at improvement
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 04:21:47 GMTWASHINGTON - The first dozen Parkinson's patients to have holes drilled in their skulls for a novel gene therapy attempt weren't harmed — and hints at some improvement have researchers embarking on a larger study to see if the treatment really may work. Doctors reported initial results of the closely watched experiment at a neurology meeting Monday, but cautioned that it's far too soon to raise hopes.
At issue: Using a nerve growth factor to try to rescue dying brain cells.
Some 1.5 million Americans have Parkinson's, a disease that gradually destroys brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical crucial for the cellular signaling that controls muscle movement. Too little dopamine causes increasingly severe tremors and periodically stiff or frozen limbs.
Standard treatments can control tremors for a while but can't stop the disease's inevitable march. So scientists are hunting ways to protect remaining dopamine-producing neurons, and rescue dying ones.
Previous attempts with growth factors haven't panned out. The new approach uses gene therapy — injecting a virus that carries a gene that in turn produces the growth factor neurturin — to try to get the protective protein right where it's needed.
None of the first 12 patients to undergo the experiment — at the University of California, San Francisco and Chicago's Rush University Hospital — suffered serious side effects, UCSF neurosurgeon Dr. Philip Starr reported Monday.
A year after treatment, three patients showed no difference on a standard rating scale of movement. But the other nine showed a 38 percent improvement, Starr told a meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons.
That doesn't mean the therapy worked, Starr cautioned. It could have been coincidence; some previous attempts found similar hints of effectiveness, only to fail when put to more rigorous testing.
But the results were encouraging enough that researchers are enrolling more Parkinson's sufferers — 56 of them — for the next stage of testing. A third of those patients will undergo sham surgery, getting the holes drilled in their skulls but no gene-carrying virus, to try to tease out whether the therapy really works.
California-based Ceregene Inc. sponsored the research.
Does less trans fat make food healthier
Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:55:38 GMTBy LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - A major change in the national diet is under way: Heart-damaging trans fat is rapidly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant food, too. But are its replacements really healthier?
It's a tricky time for consumers, because the answer depends on the food — and some are losing trans fat only to have another artery clogger take its place, that old nemesis saturated fat.
"Right now the public has to be very careful ... if something says 'trans fat-free,' what else is in it?" warns Dr. Robert Eckel, past president of the http://www.americanheart.org/facethefats — so consumers don't have to do that math. It tallies just how many grams of fat people of different ages and exercise habits can fit into a day, with lists of foods that fit the bill.
For some people, a single meal of a cheeseburger and small fries would just exceed the daily limit of bad fats. Others who are taller and more active could fit in two burgers and be OK.
Many companies are searching for trans fat alternatives that are healthier than saturated fats, Borra stresses. Indeed, the heart association brought together food makers, food chemists and health experts to explore all the options last fall, and among those generating interest are different ways to blend liquid and harder fats, in hopes of reducing the artery-clogging portions.
For now, reading the food label — the Nutrition Facts panel on the back of the package, not just the "trans-free" icon on the front — is key, says Michael Jacobson of the consumer advocacy Center for Science in the Public Interest.
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EDITOR'S NOTE — Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for The Associated Press in Washington.
Medical device firms to pay more
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:11:54 GMTWASHINGTON - The medical device industry would pay 31 percent more in fees next year to defray the cost of having its products reviewed by the government, under a proposal released Monday.
The http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/mdufma/
AdvaMed: http://www.advamed.org/
New views in desert culture on fat women
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:08:46 GMTBy RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer
NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania - Mey Mint struggles to carry her weight up the flight of stairs, her thighs shaking with each step. It will take several minutes for the 50-year-old to catch her breath, air hissing painfully in and out of her chest. Her rippling flesh is not the result of careless overeating, though, but rather of a tradition.
In Mauritania, to make a girl big and plump, 'gavage' — a borrowed French word from the practice of fattening of geese for foie gras — starts early. Obesity has long been the ideal of beauty, signaling a family's wealth in a land repeatedly wracked by drought.
Mint was 4 when her family began to force her to drink 14 gallons of camel's milk a day. When she vomited, she was beaten. If she refused to drink, her fingers were bent back until they touched her hand. Her stomach hurt so much she prayed all the animals in the world would die so that there would be no more milk.
By the time Mint was 10, she could no longer run. Unconcerned, her proud mother delighted in measuring the loops of fat hanging under her daughter's arms.
"My mother thinks she made me beautiful. But she made me sick," says Mint, who suffers from weight-related illnesses including diabetes and heart disease. She asked that her full last name not be disclosed because she feels embarrassed.
A quarter of the 1.5 million women in Mauritania — a barren, dune-enveloped country more than twice the size of Texas — are obese, according to the World Health Organization. That's lower than the 40 percent of American women who the WHO says are obese, but surprisingly high in a country that has not a single fast-food franchise.
To end the brutal feeding practices, the government has launched a TV and radio campaign highlighting the health risks of obesity. Because most Mauritanian love songs describe the ideal woman as fat, the health ministry commissioned catchy odes to thin women.
These efforts, combined with the rising popularity of foreign soap operas featuring model-thin women, has helped reduce the practice, especially among the country's urban elite.
Only one in 10 women under the age of 19 has been force-fed, compared to a third of women 40 or older, according to a survey conducted by the National Office of Statistics in 2001, the most recent available.
Those still forced to eat were overwhelmingly from the country's rural areas.
But although the canon of beauty is changing, entrenched values are hard to uproot.
"My husband thinks I'm not fat enough," complained Zeinabou Mint Bilkhere, explaining that her husband found her pretty during the last months of her pregnancy. Since giving birth, the weight has dropped, however, and with it his desire for her.
Although few women are force-fed today, many feel pressured to be bigger-than-average. Like many, Bilkhere has turned to a more scientific method of weight gain, using foreign-made appetite-inducing pills.
Wrapped in a floor-length veil, the 24-year-old, who is roughly a size 8, opens her purse and pushes a fistful of change across the counter of a roadside pharmacy for a box of Anactine, a Moroccan-made antihistamine.
The pills, commonly prescribed for hay fever, also induce hunger. They and similar drugs replace a more blunt instrument, recently outlawed by the government: animal steroids intended for fattening camels.
"When I was little, my mother hit me to eat because I didn't want to be fat. Now I want to be big because men like that," said Bilkhere, who wants to gain more than 20 pounds.
But many men say they prefer voluptuous women.
Isselmou Ould Mohamed says he loves his wife's 200-pound body and was pleased when she began adding even more weight during pregnancy. When he learned she had started walking around the soccer stadium to try to shed the extra pounds, he was revolted.
"I don't like skinny women. I want to be able to grab her love handles," said the 32-year-old. "I told her that if she loses a lot of weight, I'll divorce her."
Although Mauritania is the only culture known to force-feed girls, obesity is popular across much of the Arab world. Nomadic peoples struggling to survive the harsh desert came to prize fatness as a sign of health.
Fifty-two percent of women over 15 in Kuwait are obese, as are 46 percent in Egypt and approximately a third of women in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, according to the WHO. That contrasts sharply with most sub-Saharan countries, including Mauritania's neighbors, Senegal and Mali, where only 9 and 6 percent of women are obese.
"A man's goal is to marry a woman that fills his house. She needs to decorate it like an armoire or a TV set," said Seif l'Islam, 48, curator of a library of ancient Islamic manuscripts, which include numerous love poems to plump women.
There are signs of change. In the dying desert light, chubby women in head-to-toe veils can be seen perspiring as they walk around the capital's soccer stadium.
When she first started walking laps six years ago, 40-year-old Ramla Mint Ahmed said, she tightly veiled her face, hoping not to be recognized. Now she exercises openly and is dieting.
Her obese mother, who as a child was repeatedly woken at night and forced to drink camel's milk, says she doesn't object. But that doesn't mean her notions of beauty have changed.
Ahmed is the eldest of three daughters and the only overweight one. Her 22- and 26-year-old sisters are no larger than a size 4. In America, they would be envied for their tiny waists, yet their mother sees them differently.
Asked which daughter is the prettiest, she waves her hand dismissively toward the model-thin sisters, saying, "Definitely those two are not beautiful."
Her oldest daughter, like her, has garlands of fat on her belly and voluminous thighs.
"This one," says the mother, "has the face of a queen."
Asians rate sex lives soso survey
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:37:20 GMTSYDNEY - Asia's lovers rate sex far less highly than those elsewhere around the globe, spend less time having intercourse and are less likely to reach orgasm, according to a survey released Tuesday.
The international survey of more than 26,000 people in 26 countries found Asians ranked themselves among the least satisfied with their sex lives.
The Global Sexual Wellbeing Survey was conducted by condom-maker Durex and released at this week's World Congress on Sexual Health in Sydney.
The survey found most people around the globe had sex 106 times a year, with the Japanese the most infrequent on 48 and the Greeks putting in an Olympian effort on 164.
It might explain why respondents from Japan were the least satisfied with their sex lives, with only 10 percent ranking it as exciting, well behind the global average of 49 percent, led by Nigerians on 78 percent.
Hong Kong , Australia , Singapore , Thailand and New Zealand were also among the bottom 10 nations in the exciting sex life stakes.
India's lovers were the world's quickest, taking 13.2 minutes per session compared to the global average of 18.3 minutes, with the ranking again topped by Nigeria, on a leisurely 24 minutes.
Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand and Australia were also well below the world average for time spent on intercourse.
However, China's lovers were the seventh most lengthy in the world on 20 minutes, a heartbeat behind Malaysia's on 19.9.
Only 24 percent of respondents from Hong Kong and China reported always experiencing an orgasm during sex, the lowest in the survey, followed by Japan on 27 percent and Singapore on 36.
On average, 59 percent of respondents strongly agreed that sex was important to them, with the lowest rankings coming from Thailand on 38 percent, Japan and Hong Kong .
AIDS ravages poor children needlessly UN
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:59:03 GMTBy Laura MacInnis
GENEVA - Hundreds of thousands of children are dying of AIDS in developing countries because they do not have access to treatment readily available elsewhere, U.N. health agencies said on Tuesday.
While pediatric UNICEF.
Only 11 percent of HIV-positive pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries are given drugs to prevent passing the immunity-destroying disease to their children during childbirth, and many infants born with HIV are undiagnosed and therefore untreated, the report found.
It said that 380,000 children died of AIDS-related causes last year, mainly infections that could have been prevented.
&;Children continue to be the missing face of the AIDS pandemic,&; Ann Veneman, the head of UNICEF, said in a statement.
The agencies' report, which outlined advances in access to HIV treatment, said the number of people getting HIV therapy in poorer countries rose 54 percent last year to 2 million, though another 5 million still lack access to the life-saving drugs.
Just 15 percent of the 780,000 children in need of HIV treatment had access it by the end of 2006, and only 4 percent were given the antibiotic co-trimoxazole, which the WHO recommends for children with HIV and those born to HIV-infected mothers when early diagnosis is impossible.
&;A greater effort should be made to follow up HIV-exposed children and to determine the HIV status of all children born to mothers living with HIV/AIDS so that appropriate care and support can be provided,&; the report said.
Treatment access problems were found to be most acute in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 25 million AIDS sufferers and 85 percent of all HIV-infected pregnant women.
Children account for 14 percent of those needing therapy in the largely impoverished region but only 6 percent of those receiving it. Some African countries with high HIV burdens, such as Nigeria and Zimbabwe, offer limited treatment for children.
The United Nations agencies said more investment was needed in diagnostic tests to quickly determine whether infants have HIV, and in fixed-dosed pediatric drug formulations that could boost the survival rates of infected young ones.
They also recommended more screening for tuberculosis, which can be lethal to those with HIV, and for sexually-transmitted diseases that can make it easier to catch and spread HIV.
(For more information about the global AIDS crisis visit Reuters AlertNet http://www.alertnet.org email: alertnet@reuters.com; +44 207 542 5791)
Brain changes seen in Alzheimer39s victims before memory loss
Tue, 17 Apr 2007 05:19:50 GMTCHICAGO - People who develop Alzheimer's disease or dementia exhibit brain structure changes years before they show any signs of memory loss, a study released Monday said.
The finding may allow doctors to identify people at risk for the cognitive problems that lead to the devastating brain disease, according to the US study.
The research is based on a small study involving 136 seniors over the age of 65 who were given brain scans and cognitive testing on a regular basis over a five-year period.
By the end of the study, 23 of the volunteers had developed a condition known as mild cognitive impairment and, of those, nine went on to develop Alzheimer's disease, a progressive brain disorder which is on the rise in developed nations.
When the researchers compared the brain scans of the 23 individuals who went on to develop memory problems with the 113 volunteers who did not, they found that the first group had less gray matter in areas of the brain involved with memory processing than the second group even when their brain function was normal.
&;We found that changes in brain structure are present in clinically normal people an average of four years before MCI diagnosis,&; said Charles Smith, author of the study and an expert on memory and aging at the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington.
&;We knew that people with MCI or Alzheimer's disease had less brain volume but before now we didn't know if these brain structure changes existed, and to what degree, before memory loss begins,&; he said.
Moreover, the individuals who later developed memory problems had lower scores on cognitive test scores at the beginning of the study compared to the other seniors in the study, although the scores were within normal range.
&;These findings of structural changes in cognitively normal people before memory loss begins aren't surprising given Alzheimer's disease may be present for many years before symptoms of the disease begin to appear,&; said Smith.
The paper appears in Tuesday's issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
