I'm sure some of you saw the video above from CBN TV about the new miracle potion for Alzheimers? For once, it's not a drug. It's not even a high-carb, low fat diet! Quite the opposite: it's coconut oil and lots of it. The news is breaking that a ketogenic diet can help people with Alzheimer's keep their symptoms at bay. A ketogenic diet is a diet that uses ketones converted from dietary fat instead of carbs as energy. To be in "ketosis", people generally need to eat fewer than 50 grams of carbs per day. The average American eats around 300 grams of carbs a day, just to put that in perspective.

One percent of non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. - close to two million Americans - have celiac disease, but most are not aware they suffer the gluten-intolerance problem, according to a new study.

The results back up earlier estimates of how common celiac disease is in the U.S. and Europe, the researchers say. They also support evidence that the condition is far more rare among Hispanics and blacks.

"This one...is pretty much in line with what was shown before," said Dr. Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the study.

Fasano said that despite how common the condition is in the U.S, he's not surprised that few people have been diagnosed with it.

"The symptoms are so vague and non-specific that it's very difficult to point to celiac disease when you have (for instance) chronic fatigue or anemia or joint pain," Fasano said.

Celiac disease is mainly a gastrointestinal disorder, and when people who have it eat gluten, they experience an immune reaction that damages the intestinal lining.

Most studies to determine how widespread the condition is have been done in Europe, so the researchers sought to get a sharper estimate of celiac disease in the U.S.

Dr. James Everhart, at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, along with colleagues at the Mayo Clinic and in Sweden, used data from a large, ongoing national study of health and nutrition.

People with type AB blood may have a higher risk of heart disease compared with those whose blood type is O, according to a new study.

Researchers reviewed two studies that tracked nearly 90,000 people for more than 20 years and found that coronary heart disease risk varied with participants' blood types. People with type O blood had the lowest incidence of coronary heart disease, and compared with them, those with type AB blood were 23 percent more likely to have heart disease, while those with type B blood were 11 percent more likely, and people with type A were 5 percent more likely.

"While people cannot change their blood type, our findings may help physicians better understand who is at risk for developing heart disease," said study author Dr. Lu Qi, assistant professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

The researchers considered two Harvard studies, one that tracked 62,000 women over 26 years, and one that tracked 27,400 men over 24 years. In total, more than 2,500 people were diagnosed with heart disease.

The association with blood type held even after the researchers took into account variables that affect people's risk of heart disease, such as cholesterol levels, diabetes and hypertension.

Many agencies and clinics that use websites to recruit women to donate their eggs to those with fertility problems do not follow ethical guidelines, a new study says.

One-third of the websites examined in the study paid donors more for having presumably desirable traits, and more than half omitted the procedures' potential risks.

Among websites that mentioned specific donor traits, 64 percent said they paid more to women who had successfully donated eggs in the past, meaning the provided eggs resulted in a birth.

"Recipients often request to be matched to a 'proven' egg donor although there is no evidence that they are better gamete donors than women who have not previously donated or provided a success," said study researcher Dr. Mark Sauer, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center.

The findings raise concerns over the possible exploitation of donors, and the risk that people will be devalued by paying them for a part of their body, rather than what is ethically allowed, which is to pay for their time and discomfort, the researchers said.

Paying women for prior successful donations is particularly concerning, the researchers said, because it creates an incentive for women to donate repeatedly. Some sites paid women an extra $500 for each previous successful donation. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) recommends women donate no more than six times in their lifetime.

The findings raise questions over how effective current guidelines (set by the ASRM) are at regulating the egg donation industry, and whether there is a need for stronger regulations, the researchers said.

The idea that exercise is more important than diet in the fight against obesity has been contradicted by new research.

A study of the Hadza tribe, who still exist as hunter gatherers, suggests the amount of calories we need is a fixed human characteristic.

This suggests Westerners are growing obese through over-eating rather than having inactive lifestyles, say scientists.

One in 10 people will be obese by 2015.

And, nearly one in three of the worldwide population is expected to be overweight, according to figures from the World Health Organization.

The Western lifestyle is thought to be largely to blame for the obesity "epidemic".

Researchers are raising the alarm over triclosan - an antibacterial chemical commonly found in soaps, deodorants, mouthwashes, toothpastes and even toys and trash bags - after a study found that the compound might impair muscle function.

The researchers at the University of California, Davis and the University of Colorado studied heart muscle cells and skeletal muscle fibers exposed to triclosan in test tubes. They applied electrical stimulation, which would normally make the muscles contract, but the triclosan seemed to impair two proteins involved in contractions, causing the skeletal and cardiac fibers to fail at the cellular level.

The team also tested two groups of live animal subjects. They exposed sedated mice to the chemical and observed up to a 25 percent reduction in heart function levels within 20 minutes.

And to mimic the effect of triclosan in marine environments, the researchers exposed fathead minnows to the chemical in the water for seven days. The exposed fish showed significantly diminished swimming ability compared to controls, the researchers reported in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic say a common condition called leukoaraiosis, made up of tiny areas in the brain that have been deprived of oxygen and appear as bright white dots on MRI scans, is not a harmless part of the aging process, but rather a disease that alters brain function in the elderly. Results of their study are published online in the journal Radiology.

"There has been a lot of controversy over these commonly identified abnormalities on MRI scans and their clinical impact," said Kirk M. Welker, M.D., assistant professor of radiology in the College of Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. "In the past, leukoaraiosis has been considered a benign part of the aging process, like gray hair and wrinkles."

Leukoaraiosis, also called small vessel ischemia and often referred to as unidentified bright objects or "UBOs" on brain scans, is a condition in which diseased blood vessels lead to small areas of damage in the white matter of the brain. The lesions are common in the brains of people over the age of 60, although the amount of disease varies among individuals.

"We know that aging is a risk factor for leukoaraiosis, and we suspect that high blood pressure may also play a role," Dr. Welker said.

Dr. Welker's team performed functional MRI (fMRI) scans on cognitively normal elderly participants recruited from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging between 2006 and 2010. In 18 participants, the amount of leukoaraiosis was a moderate 25 milliliters, and in 18 age-matched control participants, the amount of disease was less than five milliliters.

Researchers for the first time have shown that members of a family of enzymes known as cathepsins -- which are implicated in many disease processes -- may attack one another instead of the bodily proteins they normally degrade. Dubbed "cathepsin cannibalism," the phenomenon may help explain problems with drugs that have been developed to inhibit the effects of these powerful proteases.

Cathepsins are involved in disease processes as varied as cancer metastasis, atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and arthritis. Because cathepsins have harmful effects on critical proteins such as collagen and elastin, pharmaceutical companies have been developing drugs to inhibit activity of the enzymes, but so far these compounds have had too many side effects to be useful and have failed clinical trials.

Using a combination of modeling and experiments, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have shown that one type of cathepsin preferentially attacks another, reducing the enzyme's degradation of collagen. The work could affect not only the development of drugs to inhibit cathepsin activity, but could also lead to a better understanding of how the enzymes work together.

An international team of scientists led by researchers at Mount Sinai School Medicine have discovered that a drug that had previously yielded conflicting results in clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease effectively stopped the progression of memory deterioration and brain pathology in mouse models of early stage Alzheimer's disease.

The findings, published July 31, 2012 in Molecular Psychiatry, demonstrate renewed potential for this compound and could lead to clinical trials in patients with early stages of the disease.

Latrepirdine, known commercially as Dimebon, was initially sold as an antihistamine in Russia, approved for use there in 1983. In the 1990s, researchers at the Institute of Physiologically Active Compounds in Moscow determined that the compound appeared effective in treating Alzheimer's disease in animals. They continued their research in humans and performed several studies, including Phase I and II trials, all of which showed significant and sustained improvement in cognitive behavior with minimal side effects. The Phase II trials, performed in Russia, were overseen by U.S. Alzheimer's researchers, including Mary Sano, PhD, Director of the Mount Sinai Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.

A popular class of diabetes drugs increases patients' risk of bladder cancer, according to a new study published online this month in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania found that patients taking thiazolidinedione (TZDs) drugs -- which account for up to 20 percent of the drugs prescribed to diabetics in the United States -- are two to three times more likely to develop bladder cancer than those who took a sulfonylurea drug, another common class of medications for diabetes.

The authors say the findings are especially important since diabetic patients are known to already be at a slightly increased risk of this type of cancer as compared to the generation population, in which about 30 in 100,000 people develop bladder cancer. Among diabetes patients overall, the incidence of this cancer is typically about 40 out of 100,000.

The authors of the new study analyzed 60,000 Type 2 diabetes patients from the Health Improvement Network (THIN) database in the United Kingdom. They found that patients treated with the TZD drugs pioglitazone (Actos) or rosiglitzaone (Avandia) for five or more years had a two-to-three-fold increase in risk of developing bladder cancer when compared to those who took sulfonylurea drugs. Among patients taking TZDs for that length of time, the team's analysis indicates that 170 patients per 100,000 would be expected to develop the disease. About 60 in 100,000 of those who take sulfonylurea drugs -- such as glipizide (Glucotrol) -- would be expected to develop bladder cancer.