Health & WellnessS


Attention

Talc Producers Failed to Note Cancer Link, South Dakota Lawsuit Says

A Sioux Falls woman is accusing Johnson and Johnson and two mining companies of failing for decades to warn consumers about a link between ovarian cancer and talcum powder.

Deane Berg, 52, applied talc-based body powder to her perineum each day after showering from 1975 to 2007, she says in a federal lawsuit filed last week. She contracted ovarian cancer in 2006.

Berg maintains that talc caused her cancer and that the companies selling the mineral knew there was a risk but failed to warn the public.

"I feel like women have been kept in the dark about a known hazard," said R. Allen Smith, Berg's lawyer. "It's the classic definition of why we need product liability lawsuits."

Red Flag

Flashback FDA Hid Research That Damned Aspartame: Fatal Studies Should Have Blocked NutraSweet Approval

When the G.D. Searle Co. sought FDA approval for NutraSweet they submitted doctored, fraudulent "studies," so corrupt that the Department of Justice appointed two prosecutors to Investigate Searle. Searle's lawyers hired the prosecutors and the case died with the statute of limitations.

Listen in on aspartame hearings in 1976 between Senator Ted Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Alexander Schmidt at the Senate Subcommittee on Labor and Public Health:
Commissioner Schmidt: "Today I would like to report to you the final results of the Food and Drug Administration's detailed investigation of animal studies performed by Searle."

Senator Kennedy: "Is this the first time, to your knowledge, that such a problem has been uncovered of this magnitude by the Food and Drug Administration?"

Dr. Schmidt: "It is certainly the first time that such an extensive and detailed examination of this kind has taken place. We have never before conducted such an examination as we did at Searle. From time to time, we have been aware of isolated problems, but we were not aware of the extent of the problem in one pharmaceutical house."

Senator Kennedy: "The extensive nature of the almost unbelievable range of abuses discovered by the FDA on several major Searle products is profoundly disturbing."
Yet a year later look what happened!

Family

Bayer Admits GMO Contamination is Out of Control

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© Unknown
Bayer has admitted it has been unable to control the spread of its genetically-engineered organisms despite 'the best practices [to stop contamination]'(1). It shows that all outdoors field trials or commercial growing of GE crops must be stopped before our crops are irreversibly contaminated.

$2 million US dollar verdict against Bayer confirms company's liability for an uncontrollable technology

Greenpeace welcomes the United States federal jury ruling on 4 December 2009 that Bayer CropScience LP must pay $2 million US dollars to two Missouri farmers after their rice crop was contaminated with an experimental variety of rice that the company was testing in 2006.

Magnify

The thalamus, middleman of the brain, becomes a sensory conductor

Two new studies show that the thalamus--the small central brain structure often characterized as a mere pit-stop for sensory information on its way to the cortex--is heavily involved in sensory processing, and is an important conductor of the brain's complex orchestra.

Published in Nature Neuroscience and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the two studies from the laboratory of Murray Sherman both demonstrate the important role of the thalamus in shaping what humans see, hear and feel.

"The thalamus really hasn't been a part of people's thinking of how cortex functions," said Sherman, professor and chairman of neurobiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center. "It's viewed as a way to get information to cortex in the first place and then its role is done. But the hope is these kinds of demonstrations will start putting the thalamus on the map."

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Post-Traumatic Stress May Harm Kids' Brains

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© Getty ImagesResearchers are trying to figure out what happens in the brain when children have post-traumatic stress symptoms.
Psychological trauma may leave a visible trace in a child's brain, scientists say.

A new study published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology found that children with symptoms of post-traumatic stress had poor function of the hippocampus, a part of the brain that stores and retrieves memories.

This is the first study to use functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to look at the function of the hippocampus in youth with symptoms of post-traumatic stress, researchers said. The findings are in line with what has been previously found in adults.

The study was led by Dr. Victor Carrion, and the senior author was Dr. Allan Reiss, both at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford University School of Medicine.

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Lab Mice Show Brain's Role in Learning, Memory

Yi Zuo, a neurobiologist at UC Santa Cruz, has discovered how learning and memory imprint their effects on the brain - spurred by inspiration from her father, her 3-year-old son and a family friend who suffered a stroke.

The intersection of those three people led to a long series of experiments with more than 200 smart and frisky laboratory mice that revealed that learning new tasks can permanently alter the brain's nerve cells in animals, and perhaps in humans.

In a recent visit to her lab among the towering redwoods on the Santa Cruz campus, Zuo explained that her lab mice have shown her and her research team that in learning a new task, the connections between specific cells in the brain are swiftly rewired, and that those fresh connections can become permanent - even after the mice learn even newer tasks.

Much the same must be true in humans, she concluded.

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Behavioral Training Rewires Brain, Study Shows

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© Iris Schneider/Los Angeles Times
It's not surprising that an intensive six-month training program for children with poor reading skills improves their performance, as a new study has demonstrated. The unexpected finding is that the skills program actually spurred brain changes that could be the underpinnings for the children's progress.

The study, published today in the journal Neuron, was lauded by the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Thomas R. Insel. The NIMH funded the research.

"We have known that behavioral training can enhance brain function," Insel said in a news release. "The exciting breakthrough here is detecting changes in brain connectivity with behavioral treatment. This finding with reading deficits suggests an exciting new approach to be tested in the treatment of mental disorders, which increasingly appear to be due to problems in specific brain circuits."

Info

Patients Lack Knowledge of Medications They Were Given in Hospital, Study Shows

In a new study to asses patient awareness of medications prescribed during a hospital visit, 44% of patients believed they were receiving a medication they were not, and 96% were unable to recall the name of at least one medication that they had been prescribed during hospitalization. These findings are published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

Inpatient medication errors represent an important patient safety issue, with one review finding some degree of error in almost one in every five medication doses. The patient, as the last link in the medication administration chain, represents the final individual capable of preventing an incorrect medication administration. Researchers from the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine conducted a pilot study to assess patient awareness of their in-hospital medications and surveyed attitudes towards increased patient knowledge of hospital medications.

"Overall, patients in the study were able to name fewer than half of their hospital medications," said lead researcher Ethan Cumbler, M.D., Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado Denver. "Our findings are particularly striking in that we found significant deficits in patient understanding of their hospital medications even among patients who believed they knew, or desired to know, what is being prescribed to them in the hospital."

Cheeseburger

The 7 foods experts won't eat

How healthy (or not) certain foods are - for us, for the environment - is a hotly debated topic among experts and consumers alike, and there are no easy answers. But when Prevention talked to the people at the forefront of food safety and asked them one simple question - "What foods do you avoid?" - we got some pretty interesting answers. Although these foods don't necessarily make up a "banned" list, as you head into the holidays - and all the grocery shopping that comes with it - their answers are, well, food for thought:

Family

First Evidence of Brain Rewiring in Children: Reading Remediation Positively Alters Brain Tissue

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© Timothy Keller and Marcel JustThe left brain image shows the area of compromised white matter (blue area) among poor readers relative to good readers at the beginning of the study. The center brain image shows the area where the structural integrity increased (red/yellow area) among poor readers who received the instruction, and it is very similar to the initially compromised area. The right brain image shows that following the instruction, there were no differences between the good and poor readers with respect to the integrity of their white matter.
Carnegie Mellon University scientists Timothy Keller and Marcel Just have uncovered the first evidence that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself, creating new white matter that improves communication within the brain.

As the researchers report today in the journal Neuron, brain imaging of children between the ages of 8 and 10 showed that the quality of white matter -- the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where information is processed -- improved substantially after the children received 100 hours of remedial training. After the training, imaging indicated that the capability of the white matter to transmit signals efficiently had increased, and testing showed the children could read better.

"Showing that it's possible to rewire a brain's white matter has important implications for treating reading disabilities and other developmental disorders, including autism," said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI).