Health & WellnessS


Bell

Cholesterol-reducing drugs may lessen brain function

Yeon-Kyun Shin
Iowa State University
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:08 UTC
Research by an Iowa State University scientist suggests that cholesterol-reducing drugs known as statins may lessen brain function.

Yeon-Kyun Shin, a biophysics professor in the department of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology, says the results of his study show that drugs that inhibit the liver from making cholesterol may also keep the brain from making cholesterol, which is vital to efficient brain function.

"If you deprive cholesterol from the brain, then you directly affect the machinery that triggers the release of neurotransmitters," said Shin. "Neurotransmitters affect the data-processing and memory functions. In other words -- how smart you are and how well you remember things."

Shin's findings will be published in this month's edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Comment: Statins are not "very healthful" at all. Evidence shows that the lower cholesterol levels are, generally speaking, the higher the risk of cancer. Cholesterol levels below 160 have been linked to depression and low testosterone levels. Statins block the body's production of CoQ10, an important nutrient and antioxidant which protects the heart among other organs as demonstrated by hundreds of studies. Coenzyme Q10 (also called ubiquinone: "occurring everywhere") plays an important role in the manufacture of ATP, the fuel that runs cellular processes. Low levels of CoQ10 are found in nearly all cardiovascular diseases, including angina, high blood pressure, cardiomyopathy, and congestive heart failure; and other diseases like Parkinson's disease. Statins deplete the body of CoQ10 by a 40%.

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Health

Hot Chili Peppers Help Unravel The Mechanism Of Pain


Science Daily
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:47 UTC
red chili pepper
© iStockphoto/Chris Bence

Capsaicin, the active ingredient in spicy hot chili peppers such as the jalapeno, is most often experienced as an irritant, but it may also be used to reduce pain. A new work published by Drs. Feng Qin and Jing Yao in this week's PLoS Biology uses capsaicin to uncover novel insight into how pain-receptor systems can adapt to painful stimuli.

Sensory systems are well known to adapt to prevailing stimuli. For example, adaptation happens when your eyes adjust from a dark movie theater during a matinee to the bright sunlight outside. Whether pain receptors truly adapt or rescale their responses (versus simply desensitizing) has been an open question.

Capsaicin acts by binding to a receptor in the cell wall of nerve endings and triggering an influx of calcium ions into the neuron. Eventually, the nervous system interprets this cascade of events as pain or heat, depending on which nerves are stimulated. Scientists had previously linked the pain-relieving effects of capsaicin to a lipid called PIP2, found in cell membranes. When capsaicin is applied to the skin it induces a strong depletion of PIP2 in the cell membrane.
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Arrow Up

Health spending takes rising share of U.S. economy


Reuters
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:54 UTC
Health spending will hit $2.5 trillion this year, devouring 17.6 percent of the economy, as the White House and Congress consider major changes to the healthcare system, U.S. government economists said on Tuesday.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, forecast that the share of the economy devoted to health spending will jump a full percentage point from 2008. That would mark the biggest one-year increase recorded since the government began tracking the data in 1960.

Thanks to the recession, public health spending in programs such as the Medicaid program for the poor is ballooning, while private health insurance spending is slowing as more people lose employer-provided coverage, CMS reported.

"We project that the health share of the economy will increase steadily through 2018," CMS economist Christopher Truffer told reporters.
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No Entry

Anger really can kill you, U.S. study shows

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:34 UTC
Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood.

"It's definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase," said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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Pills

Study: B vitamins could lower risk of macular degeneration

Mary Brophy Marcus
USA Today
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:21 UTC
Taking B vitamins could lower the risk for a leading cause of blindness in older Americans, a study reports.

"This is the first randomized trial to indicate a possible benefit of folic acid, B-6 and B-12 vitamin supplements in reducing the risks of age-related macular degeneration," says study author William Christen, an associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
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Syringe

Lung cancer vaccine 'extends terminal patients lives'

Shasta Darlington
CNN.com
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:15 UTC
Terminal lung cancer patients are living longer thanks to the world's first registered lung cancer vaccine, a leading Cuban scientist says.

Cuban scientist Dr. Gisela Gonzalez says she and her team have created a lung cancer vaccine that extends patient's lives.

Dr. Gisela Gonzalez has spent years researching the vaccine which the Cuban government approved for the use of the general public last year.

Gonzalez and her team have worked on developing the CimaVax EGF vaccine at the Cuban Center of Molecular Immunology since the early 1990s.
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Magnify

Technique Tricks Bacteria Into Generating Their Own Vaccine


ScienceDaily
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:07 UTC
Scientists have developed a way to manipulate bacteria so they will grow mutant sugar molecules on their cell surfaces that could be used against them as the key component in potent vaccines.

Any resulting vaccines, if proven safe, could be developed more quickly, easily and cheaply than many currently available vaccines used to prevent bacterial illnesses.

Most vaccines against bacteria are created with polysaccharides, or long strings of sugars found on the surface of bacterial cells. The most common way to develop these vaccines is to remove sugars from the cell surface and link them to proteins to give them more power to kill bacteria.

Polysaccharides alone typically do not generate a strong enough antibody response needed to kill bacteria. But this new technique would provide an easy approach to make a small alteration to the sugar structure and produce the polysaccharide by simple fermentation.
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Syringe

Vaccine Maker Immunity Questioned


Newsinferno.com
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:01 UTC
Consumer advocates are saying that a legal protection known as the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Program shelters vaccine makers and compromises drug safety, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal. The pharmaceutical industry disagrees.

SmartBrief pointed that a relatively recent ruling found that families of autistic children are not eligible for compensation under the program, which has many wondering to whom the program offers the most benefits.

According to FiercePharma, vaccinations have become a huge boon for industry, pointing out that the Program, which was developed in 1986, was meant for the development of vaccines to prevent childhood diseases and to ameliorate the dearth of companies willing to remain in a vaccine business heavy with lawsuits and minimal profits. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) noted that the vaccines worked and significantly minimized a wide variety of childhood diseases.
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Syringe

Video: Brain Neuron Degeneration via Mercury Poisoning

Adrenalyn
Youtube
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:41 UTC
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Gear

Video Exposing Food Lobbyists (no one covered this)

minorityfilms
Daily Kos
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:17 UTC
Anyways, with all the news focused on Chimpanzees and the Economy lately, I felt like this is a story that went under the radar. And deserves to be seen to inform the public.

So, I've been tracking the wheelings and dealings of food and beverage lobbyists for 2 years now. I worked on a documentary about the obesity epidemic and learned statistics that blew my mind. For example, when offered "fast food" items at school lunch, teenagers consume an average of 1350 calories. Or that french fries and ketchup make up 46% of the "fruits and vegetables" teenagers consume each year.

I read Marion Nestle's "Food Politics", Ann Cooper's "Lunch Lessons", and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" back-to-back, which further blew my mind.

So, when I learned that 2009 was the year Congress and the USDA would be renewing the National School Lunch Program, I decided that I would pay close attention to who the movers and shakers would be.

This lead me to a Jan 28 meeting at the Institute of Medicine. A team of scientists had been gathered to come up with revisions and updates to the vastly outdated lunch program. But when I went to the meeting, I looked at the name tags of those in the room and realized that science was in the minority...
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