Therapist Unlimited Blog

A recent medical study has shown that a great number of prostate patients do not anymore need treatment for their medical condition.
In the largest study of its kind, the international team of pathologists studied an initial 4,000 prostate cancer patients over a period of 15 years to further understanding into the natural progression of the disease and how it should be managed.
The research could be used to develop a blood test to distinguish between aggressive and non-aggressive forms of prostate cancer.
Globally, prostate cancer is the fifth most common malignancy and accounts for 13% of male deaths in the UK. Studies have shown that men with non-aggressive prostate cancer can live with the disease untreated for many years, but aggressive cancer requires immediate treatment.
Pathologists found that the presence of a protein, called Hsp-27, in cancer cells was an indicator that the disease will progress and require treatment. The study showed, however, that in more than 60% of cases the protein was not expressed and the cancer could be managed by careful monitoring, rather than with active invention methods, such as drug treatment or surgery.
The protein normally has a positive function in the body, helping healthy cells survive when they are placed under ’stressful’ conditions, such as disease or injury. If the protein is expressed in cancer, however, it can prevent the diseased cells from dying, allowing the cancer to progress. The team, supported by Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and in collaboration with scientists in London and New York, found that the protein can be used to predict how the disease will behave and could help doctors advise patients on how the disease could affect their daily lives.

A recent study has shown that prostate cancer do not necessarily need medical treatment.

Professor Chris Foster, Head of the University’s Division of Pathology, explains: "Cancer of any kind is a very distressing disease and has the ability to impact on every aspect of a person’s life. Chemotherapy and surgery can also have a significant effect on health and wellbeing and that is why it is important that we first understand the biological nature of the disease and how it will behave in each individual patient, before determining if and when a person needs a particular type of treatment.
"By studying the disease in a large number of men throughout the UK and over a long period of time, we have been able to get a more complete picture of how to manage the disease successfully, while limiting the negative impact it can have on a patient’s life. The study also demonstrates the role of modern of Pathology, not only in establishing diagnoses but in determining if the subsequent management of individual patients is biologically appropriate for their particular condition.
"The protein  or biomarker we have identified provides us with a signal that the disease will continue to progress. We know that at the point this marker is expressed, medics need to administer treatment to kill the cancer cells. We have shown that in the majority of cases, however, this marker is not expressed and therefore patients do not necessarily need to go through treatment to lead a normal life."

Medical researchers has warned pregnant mothers around the world to avoid constant exposure to tetrachloroethylene (also known as perchlorethylene, PCE) since it could cause congenital birth defects.
According to a medical study of expectant women exposed to PCE in drinking water, it was discovered that an increased risk of oral clefts and neural tube defects in their children.
Ann Aschengrau, from Boston University School of Public Health, USA, worked with a team of researchers to study the prevalence of birth defects in the children of women from 8 towns in Cape Cod who had been exposed to PCE during the period 1969-1983.
Aschengrau revealed the results suggest that the risk of certain congenital anomalies is increased among the offspring of women who were exposed to PCE-contaminated drinking water around the time of conception".

Pregnant women should keep their babies safe from birth defects by avoiding constant exposure to PCE.

From the late 1960s until 1980, hundreds of miles of pipe that had been lined with a vinyl coating containing PCE were laid in the area. It wasn’t until 1980 that officials realized the danger, creating what the researchers describe as "A vast natural experiment reminiscent of John Snow’s cholera investigation in 1854 London."
Boston University investigators found that there were 61 children with congenital anomalies among the 1,658 children with some prenatal PCE exposure and 95 children with congenital anomalies among 2,999 children with no prenatal PCE exposure.
Prenatal exposure was associated with increases in the risk of oral clefts and neural tube defects (particularly anencephaly).
Speaking about these findings, Aschengrau said, "Because PCE remains a commonly used solvent and frequent contaminant of ground and drinking water supplies, it is important to understand its impact on the developing fetus."
 

Medical experts called on pregnant women around the world to do their best to get all their flu shots as soon as the vaccines become available this year to protect them against both the seasonal flu and the H1N1 (swine) flu.
Eight organizations of medical practitioners namely American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Nurse-Midwives, the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric, and Neonatal Nurses, the Infectious Disease Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine today partnered has join hands to issue the message to protect pregnant women from the deadly H1N1 virus.
The group revealed the normal changes of pregnancy make pregnant women at increased risk of the harmful effects of flu infection.

Flu shots keep pregnant women safe from the deadly H1N1 virus.

The group then urge every pregnant woman to discuss influenza immunization with her health care provider because the risk of serious illness during pregnancy is substantial.
They explained it is important to note that the vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective in clinical trials.
Moreover, in addition to getting immunized before the flu season for both the seasonal and the H1N1 viruses, the groups also urge pregnant women to follow good hygiene habits, such as hand-washing and avoiding others who are sick, to prevent the virus from spreading.
The group said pregnant women who develop flu-like symptoms should also quickly contact their health care provider so that they can begin treatment immediately.
H1N1 flu is caused by a virus. In the spring of 2009, many people in Mexico became sick with H1N1 (swine) flu. It spread to several countries, including the United States. Now, the US is taking steps to deal with the first influenza pandemic in more than 40 years.
Research published Sept. 11, 2009 in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which surveyed pregnant women in two states, found that women who got a seasonal flu vaccine did so because their health care provider recommended it.

Young athletes are at higher risk if they suffer from a second concussion injury.

A recent medical study has shown that depression, obesity and alcohol abuse or dependency are interrelated conditions among young adult women but not men.
Using data collected when young adults were 24, 27 and 30 years of age, a team of University of Washington researchers found that nearly half the sample of 776 young adults tracked during the study met the criteria for one of these conditions at each of these time points.
Carolyn McCarty, the lead author of a new study and a UW research associate professor of pediatrics and psychology revealed the proportion of people with all three of these conditions at any one point is small.
McCarty said for women there is a great deal of overlap between these common emotional and health problems that span early adulthood.
She explained men may develop one of these conditions but they don’t tend to lead another one later on.
She said these conditions are major public health problems since take toll on families and community and are not subject to quick
fixes.
The lead researcher said it requires a lot of time, money and energy to treat them.

Young women need to be monitored constantly since they are prone to alcohol abuse, depression, and obesity.

Based on the study it was discovered that:

Women with an alcohol disorder at age 24 were more than three times as likely to be obese when they were 27.
Women who are obese at 27 were more than twice as likely to be depressed when they were 30.
Women who are depressed at 27 were at increased risk for alcohol disorders at 30.
Obesity offers men some protection against later developing depression.

 

McCarty said the research did not uncover any step-by-step progression from one these disorders to another.
However, she said clinicians treating women with one of these conditions should be aware that patients might develop another disorder.
McCarty said there are two possibilities as to why women with alcohol disorder at 24 were more likely to be obese at 27.
"The caloric intake associated with drinking alcohol may increase metabolic processes leading to weight gain. Or there may be an underlying connection to levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter, in the reward pathway in the brain because the same pathways reward both food and alcohol intake. It also may be that some people substitute food for alcohol, leading to obesity."
She said body image may play a key role in why women who are obese at 27 are more likely to report depression three years later.
"Body image is particularly important for women. There seems to be a transfer that when women feel bad they eat more.
That can have devastating effects emotionally and physically. But for men experiencing obesity, the reverse is true, and obesity seems to be protective against depression. It’s the so-called ‘jolly fat man’ theory, which suggests that overweight people are actually happier."
The link between obesity at 27 and subsequent depression at 30 among women may develop as a result of individuals self-medicating themselves.
"People who feel more emotionally down may use alcohol for a quick lift or a short-term boost. The two conditions may be connected by an underlying stress mechanism. Stress is linked to depression, so women under stress potentially eat and drink more," she said.
The study also showed that income has a significant effect on obesity at age 24 and those with higher incomes had a lower risk for weight problem.
McCarty said that finding is not surprising since many of the least nutritional items are inexpensive, and low income areas do not have the same sources of fresh fruits and vegetables that more affluent ones have.
"It costs more to eat well," she said.
McCarty believes that intervention programs are needed and can play a key role in reducing the growing public health burden caused by these conditions.
"Early prevention is important because the sooner we start the more impact we can have.
Interventions should include stress management so we can provide young people with tools to cope with situations and emotions. We also need to explore underlying factors that predispose people to these conditions, such as a family background that is not supportive or is toxic."

Two new studies have found that the number of heart attacks has fallen by up to a third in countries where bans on smoking in public places have been introduced.
Smoking in pubs, restaurants and other public spaces was banned in England and Wales in July 2007, a year after similar laws were introduced in Scotland.
The Scottish ban led to a 14 per cent fall in the number of people being admitted to
hospital with a heart attack the following year.
Libby Dowling, Care Advisor at Diabetes UK, said: "Diabetes UK supports the smoking ban and we are pleased to hear that it may reduce the number of heart attacks by more than a third in countries where it is implemented.

Studies has recently shown that smoking ban is effective in keeping humans free from any form of heart disease.

Dowling revealed people with diabetes are at increased risk.
He said smoking is harmful to everyone’s health, and in particular to the 2.5 million people with diabetes in the UK.
He added people with the condition are already at increased risk of heart disease, stroke and other circulatory problems.
Moreover, Dowling said smoking doubles the risk of these problems.
Dowling encourage those people with diabetes to give up smoking to protect their health.

A recent medical study has shown that obesity is an important factor contributing to chemotherapy resistance and increasing relapse rates among children with leukemia.
According to the study, obesity is associated with increased incidence and mortality of many types of cancer.
Leukemia is the most common cancer in children, affecting more than 2,000 children each year in the United States alone.
Lead researcher Steven Mittelman, M.D., Ph.D.,fellowship research director of the Division of Endocrinology at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, and assistant professor of pediatrics, physiology and biophysics at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California explained the increasing prevalence of obesity worldwide, these findings could have important implications for cancer treatment and may help explain the increased leukemia relapse rate in obese patients.
Mittelman revealed obesity could increase cancer incidence and mortality through a variety of ways.
He said it may impair the immune system’s ability to stop cancer, or predispose cells to become cancerous.
He added once you have cancer, and if you are obese, the fat cells themselves may impair the ability of chemotherapy to fight cancerous cells.
This study was inspired by a previous study led by a colleague, Anna Butturini, M.D., associate professor of clinical pediatrics in the Division of Hematology-Oncology at Childrens Hospital, which showed that obese children diagnosed with leukemia have a 50 percent higher chance of relapsing compared with lean children.
Using preclinical models, Mittelman and colleagues investigated the reason why obese children were more at risk of relapse.

Better keep your children away from obesity to ensure easy treatment if ever they get sick with leukemia.

They developed a mouse model of obesity and leukemia, cultured fat and leukemia cells together, and treated the leukemia cells with traditional chemotherapy drugs used in children vincristine, nilotinib, daunorubicin and dexamethasone.
Obese mice with leukemia had higher relapse rates than lean mice after treatment with the first-line chemotherapeutic agent vincristine. The chemotherapy treatments all worked less effectively in culture when fat cells were nearby.
When the mice relapsed from the leukemia, the researchers found leukemia "hiding out" in the fat tissue during chemotherapy, according to Mittelman.
"These four drugs attack leukemia cells by different routes, so when we saw fat cells blocking them we realized there could be an important mechanism promoting their ability to live and divide," he said. "We were surprised to find leukemia cells in the fat tissue."
David Hockenbery, M.D., member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and professor of internal medicine at the University of Washington, said "this study provides striking experimental support for the clinical observations that obesity is associated with poor prognosis in multiple cancers."
The researchers demonstrated that co-culture of leukemia cells with adipocytes diminishes response to multiple chemotherapeutic agents. Therefore, adipose tissue may function as a "safe haven" for leukemia cells during therapy, according to Hockenbery. Based on the finding that adipocytes accumulate chemotherapeutic drugs, he advised that careful attention be paid to dose adjustments based on pharmacokinetic measurements.
"In addition, by highlighting a potential communication between adipocyte and leukemia cells, this research will stimulate efforts to find a diffusible factor that protects leukemia cells from chemotherapy," said Hockenbery.
More research is needed to figure out how fat cells are a part of the tumor microenvironment and how they block potentially lifesaving treatments, according to Mittelman.
The researchers are currently conducting additional studies to evaluate other chemotherapeutics, how obesity may or may not affect treatment and the effect of fat cells found in bone marrow on leukemia.
 

Researchers have found new evidence showing that parents play a key role in whether or not their adolescent children who experiment with tobacco progress to become daily smokers before they graduate from high school.
A study published on-line and in the September issue of journal Pediatrics shows that parents can be a positive or negative influence on their children’s future smoking habit.
"If parents really don’t want their children to smoke they need to communicate that by establishing clear guidelines in their families about not smoking and discuss them with their school-age children." said Min Jung Kim, a research scientist with the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group and lead author of the study.
At the same time, parents can increase their children’s chances of smoking by their own use of tobacco.
"If parents smoke, teens have more access to cigarettes than teens who have non-smoking parents. A second preventive measure for smoking parents is to quit smoking themselves," said Kim.
The study included 270 adolescents who had begun smoking by the eighth grade but had not advanced to daily smoking at that time.
Daily smoking was defined as smoking one cigarette a day for the past 30 days prior to annual interviews. By the time the students were in the 12th grade, 156, or 58 percent, had become daily smokers.
The children in the study were 51 percent male and 85 percent white. They were drawn from a larger study looking at the development of healthy and problem behaviours among children at 10 suburban schools in the Pacific Northwest. Information about their smoking habits was collected during annual interviews from the seventh through 12th grades.
Aside from parenting and parental tobacco use, other factors that predicted teen smoking were having friends who smoked and involvement in other problems behaviours such as skipping school, getting into fights and engaging in vandalism.

Kim said most smoking prevention programs to not directly address the role of parental smoking or the link between anti-social behaviour and smoking, which commonly occur together.
"Parents need to know that they are still important and can make their children feel good when they do something right and also know that there are consequences when they do something wrong. Many parents think adolescence is the time for children to have their independence. But it is important to maintain good supervision of your teen. Parents who smoke also need to understand that they are modeling behavior and if they quit smoking they send a strong message to their teenager," said Kim.
She recommends that parents "should not ignore children’s experimental smoking at any age because it put them at great risk of progressing to daily smoking." To do that, parents should:
    * Set and enforce clear guideline about tobacco.
    * Monitor to ensure that your children are following your guidelines.
    * Know and monitor your children’s friends.
    * Provide clear, consistent and positive consequences for following those guidelines and appropriate, consistent negative consequences for violating them.

Groups around the world are joining hands to urge pregnant women to avoid drinking liquor during their pregnancy to keep their babies healthy and safe from any form of disease.
According to a recent study, learning disabilities, mental health issues and behaviour problems are just some of the issues that afflict babies exposed to alcohol in the womb.
Doctors, state legislators, health care professionals, parents, social workers and drug prevention and treatment specialist has recently gathered to discuss the issue on pregnant women who are drinking liquor during their pregnancy.
During the said meeting the group discovered that  women are getting conflicting information about drinking while pregnant.
while others are saying that drinking liquor during pregnancy is bad some sectors are themselves spreading the information that wine or Champagne were good for a woman’s blood while pregnant.
Some groups are also saying that drinking is safe in the first few months of pregnancy.
However, an intensive research has shown that many lifelong problems caused by permanent brain damage from drinking alcohol while pregnant.

Drinking liquor is bad for pregnant women.

Dr. Todd Ochs, a clinical instructor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said that part of the problem is that doctor training hasn’t changed to reflect new research about pre-natal alcohol exposure.
Ochs explained they used to worry about women using heroin or other illegal drugs while pregnant, but there are too many variables with alcohol that we don’t yet understand, so the best advice a doctor can give is that they shouldn’t drink at all.
Dr. Ochs has diagnosed and treated many children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders and points out, that drinking will cause damage, they just don’t know how much damage will occur or what amount of alcohol will cause the damage, and why would anyone do something that’s known to be harmful to a baby.