Health

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Synopsis: Health:

What about having an operation conducted by a surgeon taking stimulant pills? Unappealing at first glance; however would your opinion change

and the surgeon better able to keep a steady hand? Drugs that help people with brain and neuropsychiatric conditions improve concentration, planning and memory,

or reduce impulsive and risk-taking behaviours, are increasingly finding their way into the hands of healthy people who want to study harder,

and maybe we'd have more inventions, faster medical discoveries, safer transport and bigger economies.

who took the narcolepsy treatment modafinil and the cognitive disorder drug piracetam in the final year of his politics degree course at Warwick University, UK.

A 2008 online survey carried out by the journal Nature found that one in five readers had taken the anti-hyperactivity drug Ritalin, narcolepsy treatment modafinil,

with some US doctors now prescribing Adderall#amphetamine salts used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy#to healthy children from low-income families purely to improve academic performance.

Doors of perceptionshift workers truck drivers, pilots and doctors are known also to take cognitive enhancers. Stimulant use has long been commonplace in the military,

from Incans given coca leaves before battles to Allied soldiers using amphetamines during World war Two,

including experiments into the use of beta blockers to reduce stress hormones. Some argue the development of new, more effective cognitive drugs,

cardiovascular problems and psychosis associated with stimulants. We don't really know what the long-term health implications of taking these drugs are for healthy people,

Tests carried out on 18 pilots at Stanford university found those given the Alzheimer's disease drug Aricept for 30 days were better able to retain complex aviation tasks learnt on a simulator than those given placebos.

And last year Sahakian and Ara Darzi of Imperial College London, found that doctors who had been deprived of sleep for one night showed improved working memory, planning,

says Mitul Mehta, a senior lecturer at Institute of Psychiatry, King's college London. Brain scans he carried out found those with the lowest working memory capacity to begin with improved the most when taking Ritalin.

wrote the authors of Beyond Therapy, a 2003 report by the US President's Council on Bioethics.

or steadying the hands of surgeons. What about indirect coercion, feeling the need to take smart drugs

and doing so without medical supervision, says Sahakian. So it would be sensible for people to have access to safe, effective cognitive enhancers,

Regulatory authorities such as the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency are set up to evaluate the effects of treatments on disease and disorders, not healthy people.

medical clinics#and sound the alarm to stop violence from reaching certain levels of severity.#

more efficient ways of burning petrol and Diesel fuel injection has been the subject of research for more than 20 years,

if it can help reveal details about fuel injection that haven been seen before. Like its much larger sibling at Cern, the circular particle accelerator at Argonne shoots electrons around its 0. 7-mile (1. 1-km) circumference at a tiny fraction below the speed of light.

what happens when fuel injection systems squirt petrol or diesel into the cylinders which house the pistons that drive internal combustion engines.

X-rays transformed medicine by allowing doctors to see inside living bodies. Powell and others hope that by using X-rays to probe the inner workings of engines in fine detail,

our cultures become more sedentary and rates of obesity and heart disease increase. Cars not only make our cities unhealthy,

and their charging habits hint they are less likely to get so-called"range anxiety#than expected.

Or more specifically, they are keeping their battery topped up before range anxiety sets in.

is changing the way 2. 5 million people get access to doctors. Nosql database vendor Mongodb was called recently the King of New york start-ups after it raised an eye-popping $150m in funding at a valuation of $1. 2 bn.

such as poor access to clean water, the high costs of joint replacement surgery and slow responses to natural disasters.

Every day, according to the company, 55 Filipinos die from water-related diseases. The company claims its prototype fits onto most taps,

one winner, Mirand, was founded by Dr Rene Catan, a 55-year old orthopaedic surgeon. For over 20 years Catan had been dreaming of a way to make knee and joint replacements more affordable for Filipinos.

Catan says he has produced a prototype joint that should cut the cost of such surgery in half#from nearly $10, 000 to around $5, 000 or less.

He is due to conduct the first seven surgeries with his new technology this month. Henry Motte-Munoz, a former analyst at Goldman sachs and cofounder at Bantay. ph, a Philippine NGO that seeks to reduce corruption in the country through education

such as poor access to clean water, the high costs of joint replacement surgery and slow responses to natural disasters.

Every day, according to the company, 55 Filipinos die from water-related diseases. The company claims its prototype fits onto most taps,

one winner, Mirand, was founded by Dr Rene Catan, a 55-year old orthopaedic surgeon. For over 20 years Catan had been dreaming of a way to make knee and joint replacements more affordable for Filipinos.

Catan says he has produced a prototype joint that should cut the cost of such surgery in half#from nearly $10, 000 to around $5, 000 or less.

He is due to conduct the first seven surgeries with his new technology this month. Henry Motte-Munoz, a former analyst at Goldman sachs and cofounder at Bantay. ph, a Philippine NGO that seeks to reduce corruption in the country through education

With common pathogens such as E coli and the pneumonia bug K. pneumoniae developing resistance to our antibiotics of last resort, leading pharmacologists, clinicians and epidemiologists say we risk being cast back to a time

when even routine surgery put Victorians at risk of fatal infection. It's no mystery

Complacent over-prescription of antibiotics by doctors, and their reckless, profligate use in livestock rearing, has provided ample opportunity for resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria to proliferate through natural selection.

Light-switchable drugs have been explored in other fields such as cancer therapy, but not for antibiotics. Organic chemist Ben Feringa at Groningen and his co-workers used an existing light-switchable unit called azobenzene,

when swallowed, they tend to attack the"friendly#bacteria in the gut as well as pathogens. Drugs equipped with activation switches could be administered orally

All this preparation has made me slightly paranoid and for good reason. I am about to enter the large clean room at Ball aerospace in Boulder,

Using conventional weapons on such facilities runs the risk of spreading highly toxic substances, so the Pentagon has funded a number of

The growth of novel personal medical sensing technologies, many of which use Bluetooth, could soon change this.

the Scanadu Scout is described perhaps best as something approaching a real version of the medical tricorder wielded by Star trek doctor Leonard"Bones#Mccoy.

blood pressure, core body and skin temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygen levels, blood pressure and emotional stress levels.

With recent advances in technology such as Bluetooth, we are now able to build medical devices that weren't possible just a decade ago#.

"For people who live far from hospitals, in places like Africa, this could be life changing.#

once embedded under the skin monitors substances in the blood such as glucose and cholesterol so that chronic diseases like diabetes or the effects of treatments such as chemotherapy can be monitored.

The raw medical data, which is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth to an Android app, can be forwarded automatically to doctors.

Bluecell is still a few years from commercialisation.""We chose Bluetooth because of its wide distribution in consumer devices,

and Monobaby, a device being developed to prevent Sudden infant death syndrome, also known as cot death, using an accelerometer attached to baby clothing.

While all employers are required by law to enroll their employees into the National Hospital Insurance Fund,

Even malaria treatment, which costs as little as half a US dollar can cause financial difficulties for someone making just $2-$3 a day.

Dr. G. Mbugua, who has run a small clinic called Uhuru Prestige in a low-income area of the capital Nairobi for the past seven years,

#"In Kenya, we have a problem with saving for health care, #he says.""Most of my patients pay out of pocket.

They prefer to tackle health care when someone is sick. They'd rather buy food than save for health.#

"The notion of paying in advance for access to health services is foreign, but can help in preventing financial catastrophes.##

When they attended clinics, hospitals and other healthcare providers, their cards were swiped and their accounts charged at point-of-sale terminals.

Changamka pre-contracts prices with medical providers, and takes a 10%cut for services charged.

They also have a card for family health care.##Hellen Osteno, of Komarock, a low-income area on the edge of Nairobi, bought a family card in April."

as diagnosis and treatment notes are recorded also. In future doctors and other medical professionals could gain access to patients'digital medical histories thanks to M-Kadi

and other systems like it, although just as similar schemes have provoked debate in some western countries,

#Besides covering typical medical expenses, the insurance also covers add on services such as income replacement during hospitalisation, funeral assistance,

The discovery, in 1991, of around 1, 000 genes involved in generating scent receptors was rewarded with the Nobel prize in Medicine over a decade later.

preventing allergies and assisting the immune system in a number of other ways. The evidence that the balance of different microbes we have inside us is important to our health has been growing rapidly in recent years.

People with irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's and depression have been shown to have differences in gut bacteria

causing cells to release toxic gas and cilia to flap. If people have a genetic variant that produces a different form of this bitter receptor

and are more prone to severe sinus infections. Patients who regularly get serious sinus infections often opt for surgery.

However Cohen, who, along with Ben-Shahar, presented some of his findings at April's Association for Chemoreception Sciences meeting in Huntington beach,

in viral marketing and in studies of infectious diseases. Highly influential people typically have a larger than average number of social links,

#The teenage scientist revolutionising cancer detection Pancreatic cancer is a killer and one that is very hard to detect.

16-year-old scientist and researcher Jack Andraka vowed to find a quick and cheap way to test for signs of the disease.

It can also be used to test for lung and ovarian cancer. He tells BBC Future about his quest s

and major depressive disorder (MDD. The team results were reported January 28th in JAMA Psychiatry. Although some scientists have suspected that neuroinflammation can play a causal role in MDD,

it has been difficult to prove. Inflammation often occurs when the immune system is active. It is known that activation of the immune system causes behaviors that are present during major depressive episodes,

including low mood, inability to experience pleasure, weight loss, and even anorexia. Yet until now, neuroinflammation has not actually been observed in a living patient during a major depressive episode.

There has been some evidence of the link between inflammation and depression in the analysis of postmortem brain tissue.

ecause it implies that therapeutics that reduce microglial activation should be promising for treating major depression.

Spinal meningitis as a baby and extremely poor eating habits my entire life, I feel, have caused my immune system to overact.

Also, would this suggest that perhaps taking an anti inflammatory medicine can alleviate depression???I'm a counselor in training

#Problems With attention Traced to Specific Brain Circuit People with schizophrenia, for example, often find it difficult to focus their attention on a task or conversation.

The ability to do so lies at the heart of the attention problem in schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

much like attention deficit in people with schizophrenia? was intriguing for several reasons. First, the Erbb4 receptor and the molecule known as neuregulin-1 that normally connects,

or ockswith it, have repeatedly been observed to be irregular in genetic studies of people with schizophrenia.

The team results are additional evidence that these proteins are regulated abnormally in schizophrenia. The experiments also explain what appears to go wrong

#Medical device Industry Mergers and Acquisitions Hit All-time High in 2014 says Globaldata Analyst The medical device industry witnessed an all-time record high in terms of deal valuations in 2014,

Niharika Midha, MSC, Globaldata Analyst covering Medical devices, states that the unusually high amount of M&a activity last year highlights a trend that goes beyond mega-mergers and into the expansion of product portfolios.

as the medical device industry consolidates into fewer prominent players that directly compete with each other and innovation is fueled by heightened demand.

creating the world largest medical device company. Despite criticism that the move was rooted in tax inversion,

ovidien has established an market position in surgical and wound care specialties, which are promising segments.

#Neostem and Invetech Announce Agreement to Develop Closed Processing System for Cell Therapy Manufacturing Source:

NBS), a leader in the development and manufacturing of cell therapy products and regenerative medicine, and Invetech Pty Ltd("Invetech"),a global leader in instrument development, custom automation and contract manufacturing, today announced an agreement for the development of a new closed processing system (the"System")for cell

therapy manufacturing. Under the agreement, Invetech will provide system design and engineering development and Neostem will develop applications for performing closed cell processing manipulations such as separation.

which would constitute its first branded entry into the cell therapy tools market. The System will be applicable to a range of cell therapy processes in development and commercialization stages

and will consist of an instrumentation platform, disposable flow path, and operating and application software for automated execution of user-selected protocols.

"We are pleased to be partnering with Invetech on the development of a new technology specifically designed to meet the needs of our clients as their cell therapy products progress through clinical trials on a path towards commercialization,

""Working with Neostem to create equipment that will deliver services to companies in the emerging cell therapy industry is exciting

and satisfying,"said Richard Grant, global vice president, cell therapy division of Invetech.""Our team shares a common passion with Neostem to grow the cell therapy industry by developing new technology to support successful product development and commercialization.""

""Neostem's Engineering and Innovation Center (EIC) is one of the first dedicated centers responding directly to the major challenges that are facing the manufacturers of cell based therapeutics,

"said Brian Hampson, vice president, manufacturing development and engineering.""If ultimately commercialized, the sale of disposables associated with the System, especially for patient-specific therapies where one disposable set is used per patient,

could potentially become a meaningful revenue area for Neostem

#Moffitt researchers discover mechanism leading to drug resistance metastasis in melanoma Moffitt Cancer Center researchers have discovered a mechanism that leads to resistance to targeted therapy in melanoma patients

and are investigating strategies to counteract it. Targeted biological therapy can reduce toxicity and improve outcomes for many cancer patients,

when compared to the adverse effects of standard chemotherapeutic drugs. However, patients often develop resistance to these targeted therapies,

resulting in more aggressive cells that can spread to other sites or cause regrowth of primary tumors.

B-Raf is a protein that is frequently mutated in human cancers leading to increased tumor cell growth, survival and migration.

Drugs that target B-Raf or another protein in the same network called MEK have proved effective in clinical trials.

Several B-Raf and MEK inhibitors have been approved with the combination of A b-Raf and a MEK inhibitor being the current standard of care for patients with B-Raf mutant melanoma.

However over time many patients become resistant to B-Raf and B-Raf/MEK inhibitor therapy.

Moffitt researchers found that patients who are on B-Raf inhibitor drugs develop more new metastases than patients who are on standard chemotherapy.

The researchers wanted to determine how this acquired resistance develops in order to devise better treatment options for patients.

They found that melanoma cells that are resistant to B-Raf inhibitors tend to be more aggressive and invasive,

thereby allowing the tumor to spread to a new organ site. They used a large screening approach

and MEK inhibitors are given to patients intermittently may reduce the aggressiveness of the disease...meaning patients could stay on therapy for more time,

"said Keiran S. Smalley, Ph d.,scientific director of the Donald A. Adam Comprehensive Melanoma Research center of Excellence at Moffitt.

The research also showed that targeting Epha2 reduced the aggressive behavior of the melanoma cells.

This suggests that drugs that target Epha2 may prevent the development of new disease in patients who receive B-Raf and B-Raf/MEK inhibitor therapy y

#Chemists show proof of concept for new method of accelerating drug discovery research Source: Emory Health Sciences Chemists have made a significant advancement to directly functionalize C-H bonds in natural products by selectively installing new carbon-carbon bonds into highly complex alkaloids

Nature Communications published the findings, emerging from a collaboration with Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research and Emory University.

"We've shown that C-H functionalization has reached the stage where it can readily be applied to derivatization of nitrogen-containing compounds, ubiquitous in the discovery and development of new medicines."

"Alkaloids are a family of natural products produced by plants that have biological properties important to medicine.

whether a compound is toxic or carries other liabilities, or has the right mix of properties to become a safe and effective therapeutic agent,

"Davies says. The results outlined in the paper demonstrate the efficiency of rhodium catalysts to selectively install a new carbon-carbon bond into complex alkaloids in a highly controlled manner.

#Enzymes believed to promote cancer actually suppress tumors Upending decades-old dogma, a team of scientists at the University of California,

San diego School of medicine say enzymes long categorized as promoting cancer are, in fact, tumor suppressors and that current clinical efforts to develop inhibitor-based drugs should

instead focus on restoring the enzymes'activities. The findings are published in the January 29 issue of Cell.

which are cancer-relevant activities, such as cell survival, proliferation, apoptosis, and migration. The discovery that they are receptors for tumor-producing phorbol esters,

plant-derived compounds that bind to and activate PKC, created a dogma that activation of PKCS by phorbol esters promoted carcinogen-induced tumorigenesis."

"For three decades, researchers have sought to find new cancer therapies based on the idea that inhibiting

or halt tumor development,"said Alexandra Newton, Phd, professor of pharmacology and the study's principal investigator,

PKCS do not promote cancer progression; rather, they act to suppress tumor growth. Using live cell imaging, first author Corina Antal, a graduate student in the Biomedical sciences program at UC San diego,

characterized 8 percent of the more than 550 PKC mutations identified in human cancers. This led to the unexpected discovery that the majority of mutations actually reduced

or abolished PKC activity, and none were activating. The mutations impeded signal binding, prevented correct structuring of the enzyme,

tumor growth in a mouse model was reduced, demonstrating that normal PKC activity inhibits cancer. One possible explanation, said the researchers,

is that PKC typically represses signaling from certain oncogenes-genes that can cause normal cells to become cancerous.

When PKC is lost, oncogenic signaling increases, fueling tumor growth.""Inhibiting PKC has so far proved not only an unsuccessful strategy in a number of cancer clinical trials,

but its addition to chemotherapy has resulted in decreased response rates in patients, "said Newton.""Given our results,

Our findings suggest therapeutic strategies need to go the other way and target ways to restore PKC activity,

"How could this misconception of PKC promoting tumors have arisen? Long-term activation of PKCS by phorbol esters results in their degradation, said first author Antal.

In models of tumor promotion, a sub-threshold dose of a carcinogen is painted on mouse skin,

Thus, their tumor-promoting function may arise because a brake to oncogenic signaling has been removed

#UCLA study IDS two genes that boost risk for posttraumatic stress disorder Why do some people develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

while others who suffered the same ordeal do not? A new UCLA discovery may shed light on the answer.

UCLA scientists have linked two gene variants to the debilitating mental disorder, suggesting that heredity influences a person's risk of developing PTSD.

Published in the February 2015 edition of the Journal of Affective disorders, the findings could provide a biological basis for diagnosing

"Many people suffer with posttraumatic stress disorder after surviving a life-threatening ordeal like war, rape or a natural disaster,

We investigated whether PTSD has genetic underpinnings that make some people more vulnerable to the syndrome than others."

With support from the Armenian Relief Society, Goenjian and his colleagues helped establish a pair of psychiatric clinics that treated earthquake survivors for 21 years.

where Goenjian and his colleagues combed the DNA of 200 individuals for genetic clues to psychiatric vulnerability.

In the current study, Goenjian and first author Julia Bailey, an adjunct assistant professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public health, focused on two genes called COMT and TPH-2

Too much or too little dopamine can influence various neurological and psychological disorders. TPH-2 controls the production of serotonin

"The team used the most recent PTSD criteria from the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual to measure genes'role in predisposing someone to the disorder.

and identify new drug therapies for prevention and treatment.""Still, Goenjian cautioned, PTSD is caused likely by multiple genes

A technique developed at Boston Children's Hospital allows these subtle mutation patterns to be traced

and provides a new way to study both the normal brain and brain disorders such as epilepsy and autism.

and have been suggested as a possible cause of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, epilepsy or intellectual disability (see this review article for further background).

But they also can be completely benign or have just a subtle effect.""Our findings are intriguing

"These same technologies can now be used to study the brains of people who died from unexplained neuropsychiatric diseases to determine

Co-first author Alice Eunjung Lee, Phd, from the lab of Peter Park, Phd, at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical school, developed the study's retrotransposon analysis tool,

"Presently, we often wait for failure, in school or in mental health, to prompt attempts to help,

"We will need to make sure that knowledge of future behavior is used to personalize educational and medical practices,

#Genome wide expression changes in vascular tissue identified due to infection/diet Source: Boston University Medical Centeralthough it has been shown that a diet high in fat

These findings which currently appear inbmc Genomics suggest that future therapies for this disease may need to be individualized.

Atherosclerosis is a common human disease associated with heart attack and stroke. Certain bacteria as well as high fat diet are associated with an increased risk for atherosclerosis.

One of these bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis is found in the mouth of humans with periodontal disease; another Chlamydia pneumoniae causes pneumonia.

In this study the researchers used four experimental groups to compare genome-wide expression changes in vascular tissue.

and infection with Porphyromonas gingivalis andchlamydia pneumoniae in the general population and the likelihood of co-morbidity of obesity with chronic or recurring infection with these common pathogens these findings suggest that the development of atherosclerosis in humans is likely more complex

and multifactorial than previously appreciated explained senior author Caroline Attardo Genco Phd professor of medicine and microbiology at BUSM.

These findings may explain how specific infections or a high-fat diet may cause atherosclerotic plaques to undergo changes which affect their size

and stability and may ultimately lead to a heart attack she added d

#Vanderbilt-led team studies blood test for prostate cancer Vanderbilt University researcher William Mitchell, M d.,Ph d,

. and colleagues in Germany and Canada have demonstrated a method for detecting"cell-free"tumor DNA in the bloodstream.

Mitchell believes the technique will be transformative in providing improved cancer diagnostics that can both predict treatment outcomes and monitor patient responses to therapy.

In a large retrospective study of blood samples, the researchers showed that the method, called a"liquid biopsy,

"could accurately distinguish prostate cancer from normal controls without prior knowledge of the genetic"signature"of the tumors,

and with over three times the sensitivity of current prostate specific-antigen antigen (PSA) screening. The study appears in the January issue of Clinical Chemistry (volume 61, page 239),

which is dedicated to"Molecular Diagnostics: A Revolution In progress.""""Based on the reported data and work in progress, I believe the'liquid biopsy'will revolutionize cancer diagnostics,

not only before a patient begins therapy but also following patient responses to therapy,"said Mitchell, the paper's corresponding author and professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology.

The study collected serum from more than 200 patients with prostate cancer and more than 200 controls.

The samples included PSA levels and prostate tissue biopsy grading, called the Gleason score. The researchers reported that the technique distinguished prostate cancer from normal controls with 84-percent accuracy,

and cancer from benign hyperplasia and prostatitis with an accuracy of 91 percent. Because the method quantifies the inherent chromosomal instability of cancer

and can be followed as a function of time without having to do an invasive tissue biopsy,

it is called a"liquid biopsy.""It's been known for many years that dying cells, including tumor cells, shed DNA into the bloodstream.

But only recently has technology, notably"next-generation sequencing, "made it possible to reliably distinguish

and quantify cancer-specific DNA from normal controls by the identification and chromosomal location of billions of specific DNA fragments present in blood as cell-free DNA.

The prostate cancer study identified 20"hotspots"of greatest chromosomal instability as additions or deletions in less than 0. 5 percent of the total DNA present in human chromosomes.

While researchers around the world are working on their own"liquid biopsies""Mitchell said the group's technique takes a broader approach.

It examines the entire genome rather than known specific gene point mutations. Robust mutation panels vastly improve monitoring

since cancer cells are constantly deleting chromosomal DNA and liquid biopsies with only one or two mutations will allow cancer cell escape variants to go undetected,

he said. Since the entire genome was surveyed, the researchers were able to identify a non-coding region of the genome as a"hotspot,

"which may be generating previously unrecognized chromosomal control elements in prostate cancer. The other 19"hotspots"were involved rich in genes in replication

and cell control processes that are highly relevant to cancer.""Since cell-free DNA has a relatively short half-life in the circulation,

sequencing of cell-free DNA soon after therapy may be used to detect minimal residual disease in solid tumors,

"Mitchell said. The researchers reported similar results in a study of breast cancer at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago.

Mitchell further predicted that liquid biopsies will quantify immediate tumor responses to therapy y

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