Researchers at the University at Buffalo have shown that exposure to air pollution early in life and when a woman gives birth to her first child may alter her DNA and may be associated with premenopausal breast cancer later in life.

The findings indicated that higher air pollution exposure at birth may alter DNA methylation, which may increase levels of E-cadherin, a protein important to the adhesion of cells, a function that plays an essential role in maintaining a stable cellular environment and assuring healthy tissues.

Methylation is a chemical process that has been implicated in determining which genes in a cell are active, a process essential to normal cellular function.

Stem-cell transplants may control and even reverse multiple sclerosis symptoms if done early enough, a small study has suggested.

Not one of 21 adults with relapsing-remitting MS who had stem cells transplanted from their own bone marrow deteriorated over three years.

And 81% improved by at least one point on a scale of neurological disability, The Lancet Neurology reported.

Further tests are now planned, and a UK expert called the work "encouraging".

MS is an autoimmune disease which affects about 85,000 people in the UK.

It is caused by a defect in the body's immune system, which turns in on itself, causing damage to the nerves which can lead to symptoms including blurred vision, loss of balance and paralysis.

• 927million prescriptions given out last year alone
• Average 17.8 prescriptions for every person in England
• Cost to NHS estimated at £9BILLION every 12 months

More prescription drugs than ever are being given out, with the annual bill soaring to nearly £9billion.

The amount of medicine dispensed has jumped almost 70 per cent over the last decade.

Last night fears were expressed that doctors were taking the easy way out when reaching for the prescription pad instead of considering other treatments.

There were also concerns about the huge amount of medicine which is simply wasted by patients.

But experts denied that Britain is over-dependent on drugs, saying an ageing population and more emphasis on preventing disease inevitably pushes up prescribing rates.

According to a new report released yesterday, efforts to protect children's health have been fatally blocked by American industry's refusal to submit information on the commercial use of chemicals.

In a scathing critique of a voluntary reporting strategy launched with great fanfare under the Clinton administration - and quietly killed in recent years - the EPA's Inspector General wrote that the Voluntary Children's Chemical Evaluation Program was a bust.

According to the Inspector General, the much-hyped program was "hampered by industry partners who chose not to voluntarily collect and submit information, and EPA's decision not to exercise its regulatory authorities under the Toxic Substances Control Act to compel data collection. EPA has not demonstrated that it can achieve children's health goals with a voluntary program."

This is not news to anyone who has followed EPA's uphill battle to regulate toxic chemicals in the environment and in consumer goods. Nor is it news to anyone who has watched the agency's various voluntary programs fail to win industry cooperation - despite endless "stakeholder meetings" in which companies repeatedly promise to pony up the details about their products' potential health risks.

Washington is experiencing an epidemic of worry over vaccine safety. The state leads the nation in the percentage of parents opting out of vaccinations for their kindergarten-age children, but a new state law could be poised to change that distinction.


More than 6 percent of Washington kindergarteners were missing one or more immunizations in the 2009-2010 school year. The most commonly skipped vaccine was the chicken pox vaccine, The Daily Herald reported in Sunday's newspaper.

Since 1997, there's been a steady, statewide decline in the number of school children who are fully vaccinated.

A new state law that went into effect in July seeks to close a loophole that parents used to avoid providing proof of vaccinations to schools. Now, parents must meet with a medical provider, get a signed letter confirming that the consultation took place, and provide the note to child-care centers or schools.

Turning up in and on everything from food to money, BPA's ubiquity is raising concerns.

The Environmental Protection Agency solicited public comment, July 26, about whether to require new toxicity testing and environmental sampling of bisphenol A, an ingredient in many plastics and food-contact resins.

"A number of concerns have been raised about the potential human health and environmental effects of BPA," said Steve Owens, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Data from the proposed new tests, he said, "would help EPA better understand and address the potential environmental impacts of BPA."

Moreover, the agency observes on its BPA Action Plan website, because this high-volume commercial chemical "is a reproductive, developmental, and systemic toxicant in animal studies and is weakly estrogenic, there are questions about its potential impact, particularly on children's health and the environment."

"The Woodstock of Evolutionary Medicine"

- Loren Cordain

The Ancestral Health Symposium fosters collaboration among scientists, healthcare professionals and laypersons who study and communicate about health from an evolutionary perspective to develop solutions to our modern health challenges.

About the Symposium

The symposium is presented by the Ancestral Health Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating healthcare professionals and laypersons on ancestral lifestyle dynamics.

This year's inaugural event has been produced by a hobbyist volunteer model, utilizing the strengths of various individuals who proudly live an ancestral lifestyle. This model has helped keep the cost of attending the symposium low.

Adults who consume high levels of sugar have significantly elevated levels of several risk factors for heart disease, according to a new study by a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, and in Japan.

The study results suggest that U.S. dietary guidelines for sugar may be lax and should be reconsidered, the researchers say. Their findings will be reported online today (July 28) in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, and will appear in the journal's October print edition.

"While there is evidence that people who consume large amounts of sugar are more likely to have heart disease or diabetes, it has been controversial as to whether high-sugar diets may actually promote these diseases," said Kimber Stanhope, the study's senior author and a research scientist at UC Davis.

"Our new findings demonstrate that several factors associated with an elevated risk for cardiovascular disease were increased in individuals who consumed 25 percent of their calories as fructose or high fructose corn syrup," Stanhope added.

For any mental illness or passing mood swing that may trouble a person, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- better known as the DSM -- has a label and a code. Recurring bad dreams? That may be a Nightmare Disorder, or 307.47. Narcolepsy uses the same digits in a different order: 347.00. Fancy feather ticklers? That sounds like Fetishism, or 302.81. Then there's the ultimate catch-all for vague sadness or uneasiness, General Anxiety Disorder, or 300.02. That's a label almost everyone can lay claim to.

These codes are used by doctors, psychologists, and regulators to maintain a mutual language; it's a handy shorthand system for bureaucratic purposes. But over the past few decades, the staggering, ever-expanding influence of the ever-expanding DSM, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, has also played a lead role in building wealth and off-label product uses for the major drug manufacturers. In an insightful essay in this week's New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, explains how.

Angell's essay is based on a review of three current books examining the psychiatric industry: The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker, and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry--A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis, by Daniel Carlat. She also cites the DSM-IV, the most recent edition of the manual, while her review traces big pharma's role in our current mental disorder epidemic to the DSM-III, published in 1980.

More than 16 percent of U.S. adults have high cholesterol, defined as 240 mg/dL and above, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even the average level for Americans, 200 mg/dL, is borderline high, they say.

This high cholesterol, public health agencies say, is putting people at an increased risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. This stated "fact" scares millions of Americans into take statin cholesterol-lowering drugs to get their levels as low as possible ... but what if this "fact" was actually not true?

Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?

Cholesterol is actually an essential part of your body, used to produce cell membranes, steroid hormones, vitamin D and the bile acids your body needs to digest fat. Your brain needs cholesterol to function properly, as does your immune system, and if a cell becomes damaged, it needs cholesterol in order to be repaired.

In fact, making excess cholesterol is actually your body's response to inflammation, which it does to help heal and repair your cells. So if you have high cholesterol you probably have high inflammation levels too (more on this later).

Many Americans are under the mistaken impression that all cholesterol is bad, but in reality cholesterol is good for your body and necessary for you to live. Unfortunately, the "lipid hypothesis" (aka the "diet-heart hypothesis"), the one that claims foods high in saturated fats drive up your cholesterol levels, which clog your arteries and lead to heart disease, is widely accepted and has helped to spread the misinformation about cholesterol throughout the public.

But the lipid hypothesis is actually seriously flawed.

In his book The Cholesterol Myths, Uffe Ravnskov, M.D., Ph.D., explained that Ancel Keys, who performed the study upon which the Lipid Hypothesis is based, used cherry-picked data to prove his point that countries with the highest intake of animal fat have the highest rates of heart disease.

Ravnskov revealed that the countries used in the study were handpicked, and those that did NOT show that eating a lot of animal fat lead to higher rates of heart disease were left out of the study, leading to entirely skewed, and faulty, data.