This is an article from Health24.com, 28th July stating that researchers have discovered a set of genes which could help tremendously in predicting if breast cancer would spread to the lungs and how serious it will be:
"Researchers have identified a set of genes that seems to predict if breast cancer will spread to the lungs and how serious the disease will be.
The finding could eventually help doctors to predict whose disease will become aggressive and spread, and potentially help them to better target treatments. The lungs and the bones are frequent sites for cancer that spreads from the breast. And cancer that spreads from the breast to organs such as the lungs accounts for the majority of breast cancer-related deaths, research has shown.
"We are the first to identify a clinically relevant set of genes that can predict metastases (spread) of breast cancer to the lungs," said study co-author Gaorav Gupta, a graduate student and researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York City.
A report on the finding appears in the July 28 issue of Nature.
How the study was conducted(sub-title)
The researchers began with a set of cancer cell lines from 82 human breast cancer tumours. "We used a mouse model to mimic metastases," Gupta said. "We take these cells and inject them into a special type of mouse that allows you to inject human cells into them. We allowed lung metastases to form. We took out the lung metastases and took the cells and asked, 'What is special about these cells that will allow them to create the metastases?' "
To answer the question, the researchers used a "microarray" technique that allowed them to look at 22 000 genes all at once. Then they identified the genes that created the cancer spread to the lungs, and then put the genes back into the original cells to verify they were responsible.
Then they took another look at the human tumours. "We asked, of these 82 tumours, which ones expressed our genes (identified as those responsible for the spread). We found a subgroup that expressed the genes and these patients were much more likely to develop lung metastasis."
Next, said Gupta, the research team hopes to repeat the findings in a larger group of patients, "to be certain this isn't just something unique about the cohort we selected."
If patients with these genes can be identified, the next avenue of research would be to figure out if there are specific drugs that could prevent the lung tumours from forming. Certain "inhibitor" drugs have already been shown to suppress the genes identified in the new study, Gupta said.
May be of great value in managing breast cancer patients (sub-title)
William C. Phelps, scientific programme director of the research department for the American Cancer Society, praised the new study, saying, "Being able to identify a patient with a higher probability of developing metastasis would be of tremendous importance in terms of managing these patients."
The severity and course of cancer, even the same type, can be very different from patient to patient, Phelps said. "One of the decisions to struggle with is what (treatment) to give to which patients," he said. "Obviously, if you know cells in a particular tumour will be more likely to spread to the lung or bone, you would treat these patients more aggressively."
The identification of the gene pattern is a first step, he said. "If we can identify those genes, the next step may be to target the genes for therapy to prevent the spread of the tumours." – (HealthDayNews) "
This is realli good news as doctors can now be more accurate in their diagnosis and need not worry about whether the medication is given in the right dose or not. Anyway, my bio lecturer today mentioned that in Singapore, some diagnostic kit that could detect viruses like the H5N1 strain, has been created and is fast and accurate unlike the conventional method, so I might comment about it if the newspaper is not taken home by my uncle. Even if it is, I'll probably just wait for my mum to come back from overseas so I could go home and take the newspaper.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
High heels can drive you crazy
This is a very interesting article from News24.com, 25th July . It's a relation between wearing high heel shoes and schizophrenia. (There are some rather long and profound medical terms) : "Malmo - Verifying what many women have known for years, a scientist in Sweden says wearing high heels can drive you crazy, and he has drawn alarming parallels between heels and schizophrenia among women.
Jarl Flensmark of Malmo says high heels cause their wearers to tense their calves in a way that normal walking never does. That could prevent neuro-receptors in the calf muscles from triggering release of dopamine, a compound necessary for mental well-being.
"During walking, synchronised stimuli from mechanoreceptors in the lower extremities increase activity in cerebellothalamo-cortico- cerebellar loops through their action on NMDA-receptors," Flensmark wrote in a recent paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses.
Increased schizophrenia prevalence (sub-title)
"Using heeled shoes leads to weaker stimulation of the loops. Reduced cortical activity changes dopaminergic function, which involves the basal gangliathalamo-cortical-nigro-basal ganglia loops," he said.
Long-term wearing of high heels could conceivably explain why Western societies have higher rates of schizophrenia among women then do other societies where high heels are rarely worn.
"Heeled footwear," he writes, "began to be used more than 1 000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of schizophrenia. Industrialisation of shoe production increased schizophrenia prevalence.
"Mechanisation of the production started in Massachusetts, spread from there to England and Germany, and then to the rest of Western Europe. A remarkable increase in schizophrenia prevalence followed the same pattern."
"The oldest depiction of a heeled shoe comes from Mesopotamia, and in this part of the world we also find the first institutions making provisions for mental disorders In the beginning, schizophrenia appears to be more common in the upper classes."
Upper classes the hardest hit (sub-title)
He cites evidence from other parts of the world, too - Turkey, Taiwan, the Balkans, Ireland, Italy, Ghana, Greenland, the Caribbean and elsewhere. He then cites studies from India and elsewhere, which seem to confirm "schizophrenia first affects the upper classes".
From these two streams of evidence - the rise of heels and the increase in documented cases of schizophrenia - Flensmark divines a strong connection.
He modestly implies he is not the first to do so. In the year 1740, he writes, "the Danish-French anatomist Jakob Winslow warned against the wearing of heeled shoes, expecting it to be the cause of certain infirmities which appear not to have any relation to it".
Flensmark boils the matter into a damning statement: "After heeled shoes are introduced into a population, the first cases of schizophrenia appear and then the increase in prevalence of schizophrenia follows the increase in use of heeled shoes.
"I have," he writes, "not been able to find any contradictory data." - Sapa-dpa "
Hmm it does sound a little scary to me, I mean, I wear high heel shoes most of the time when i go out (when I do not have school and also when I have the time, haha) so it does sort of shock me for a while. I've read some news last year, that wearing high heel shoes hurt your tendons if u do not message your ankles after you take them off. So, after I wear them, I'll always sort of message my ankles, it does make them feel better. But, wow, now it's linked to schizophrenia..maybe I shouldn't wear them that often then.
Jarl Flensmark of Malmo says high heels cause their wearers to tense their calves in a way that normal walking never does. That could prevent neuro-receptors in the calf muscles from triggering release of dopamine, a compound necessary for mental well-being.
"During walking, synchronised stimuli from mechanoreceptors in the lower extremities increase activity in cerebellothalamo-cortico- cerebellar loops through their action on NMDA-receptors," Flensmark wrote in a recent paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses.
Increased schizophrenia prevalence (sub-title)
"Using heeled shoes leads to weaker stimulation of the loops. Reduced cortical activity changes dopaminergic function, which involves the basal gangliathalamo-cortical-nigro-basal ganglia loops," he said.
Long-term wearing of high heels could conceivably explain why Western societies have higher rates of schizophrenia among women then do other societies where high heels are rarely worn.
"Heeled footwear," he writes, "began to be used more than 1 000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of schizophrenia. Industrialisation of shoe production increased schizophrenia prevalence.
"Mechanisation of the production started in Massachusetts, spread from there to England and Germany, and then to the rest of Western Europe. A remarkable increase in schizophrenia prevalence followed the same pattern."
"The oldest depiction of a heeled shoe comes from Mesopotamia, and in this part of the world we also find the first institutions making provisions for mental disorders In the beginning, schizophrenia appears to be more common in the upper classes."
Upper classes the hardest hit (sub-title)
He cites evidence from other parts of the world, too - Turkey, Taiwan, the Balkans, Ireland, Italy, Ghana, Greenland, the Caribbean and elsewhere. He then cites studies from India and elsewhere, which seem to confirm "schizophrenia first affects the upper classes".
From these two streams of evidence - the rise of heels and the increase in documented cases of schizophrenia - Flensmark divines a strong connection.
He modestly implies he is not the first to do so. In the year 1740, he writes, "the Danish-French anatomist Jakob Winslow warned against the wearing of heeled shoes, expecting it to be the cause of certain infirmities which appear not to have any relation to it".
Flensmark boils the matter into a damning statement: "After heeled shoes are introduced into a population, the first cases of schizophrenia appear and then the increase in prevalence of schizophrenia follows the increase in use of heeled shoes.
"I have," he writes, "not been able to find any contradictory data." - Sapa-dpa "
Hmm it does sound a little scary to me, I mean, I wear high heel shoes most of the time when i go out (when I do not have school and also when I have the time, haha) so it does sort of shock me for a while. I've read some news last year, that wearing high heel shoes hurt your tendons if u do not message your ankles after you take them off. So, after I wear them, I'll always sort of message my ankles, it does make them feel better. But, wow, now it's linked to schizophrenia..maybe I shouldn't wear them that often then.
Long-term wearing of high heels could conceivably explain why Western
societies have higher rates of schizophrenia among women then do other societies where high heels are rarely worn.
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Showers 'may damage your brain'
This piece of article was from news24. com . It reported: "Traces of magnesium found in household water could be sufficient to cause permanent brain damage to those who take a regular shower, according to a report published in the US journal Medical Hypotheses.
John Spangler of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina and his team suggested that breathing in vapour containing manganese salts could be dangerous over the longer term.
"Inhaling manganese, rather than eating or drinking it, is far more efficient at delivering manganese to the brain. The nerve cells involved in smell are a direct pathway for toxins to enter the brain," Spangler wrote.
The team used animal studies aimed at showing how much a person who showered for 10 minutes a day would absorb.
The effects are dependent on the levels of manganese in household water. In the United States, a limit of 0.5 milligrams a litre of water is imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, while in the European Union, an upper level of just a 10th of that was set only in 1998.
Spangler suggested that even levels below the US upper limit could lead to brain damage.
Ten years of showering in water containing concentrations of manganese around the US limit would expose young people to levels three times higher than that found to leave deposits in rats' brains.
The longer the exposure, the worse the risk.
Manganese poisoning leads to tremors in sufferers - much like Parkinson's disease.
Apart from natural sources in ground water, manganese is sometimes added to petrol. This also finds its way ultimately into drinking water. "
Sounds rather scary, luckily i dun take more than 30 mins in the shower..usually abt 10-15. Anyway..I tot at first it might onli apply to the waters in US but I've checked up the public utilities board website in singapore and they do add manganese (about < 0.05 mg) so...well.. I guess a possible solution to prevent the effect and still be able to take regular showers is to either take away tt manganese and/or substitute it with a safer element.
John Spangler of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina and his team suggested that breathing in vapour containing manganese salts could be dangerous over the longer term.
"Inhaling manganese, rather than eating or drinking it, is far more efficient at delivering manganese to the brain. The nerve cells involved in smell are a direct pathway for toxins to enter the brain," Spangler wrote.
The team used animal studies aimed at showing how much a person who showered for 10 minutes a day would absorb.
The effects are dependent on the levels of manganese in household water. In the United States, a limit of 0.5 milligrams a litre of water is imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, while in the European Union, an upper level of just a 10th of that was set only in 1998.
Spangler suggested that even levels below the US upper limit could lead to brain damage.
Ten years of showering in water containing concentrations of manganese around the US limit would expose young people to levels three times higher than that found to leave deposits in rats' brains.
The longer the exposure, the worse the risk.
Manganese poisoning leads to tremors in sufferers - much like Parkinson's disease.
Apart from natural sources in ground water, manganese is sometimes added to petrol. This also finds its way ultimately into drinking water. "
Sounds rather scary, luckily i dun take more than 30 mins in the shower..usually abt 10-15. Anyway..I tot at first it might onli apply to the waters in US but I've checked up the public utilities board website in singapore and they do add manganese (about < 0.05 mg) so...well.. I guess a possible solution to prevent the effect and still be able to take regular showers is to either take away tt manganese and/or substitute it with a safer element.
"Traces of magnesium found in household water could be sufficient to cause permanent brain damage to those who take a regular shower"
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Cars develop killer heat, even on cooler days
I am so super sorry...i've not updated this blog for like a week? haha..okay..so i've found this rather informative article in NewScientist, 05 July It's title is "Cars develop killer heat, even on cooler days" It's quite important actually especially for parents who drives and usually leave their kids in the car for a while: "Sunlight can heat car interiors to lethal temperatures in just 30 minutes, even if the weather is relatively cool, a new US study has found. The researchers strongly urge parents not to leave children alone in parked cars, no matter how mild the weather.
“Even on relatively mild-temperature days, the internal temperature of a vehicle left in the sun quickly gets very warm – the average rise in one hour is 22°C," says lead author Catherine McLaren at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "My guess is that parents would be surprised that leaving children in the car is very much like leaving them in a sauna.”
In 2004, 35 children died of heat stroke in the US after being left unattended in a parked car. Previous research has shown that when ambient temperatures rise above 35°C, sealed cars reach a suffocating 65°C in just 15 minutes.
But research on car heating has all been conducted on hot days – never less than 28°C. So McLaren and her colleagues wanted to test how hot cars could get on cooler days, when the dangers of enclosed vehicles might not be as obvious to parents.
Open windows (sub-heading)
On 16 cloud-free days in Northern California, the team measured a car’s inside temperature at 5 minute intervals for one hour post-parking. Ambient temperatures on the study days ranged from 22°C to 35°C.
They found that, regardless of outside air temperature, the car heated up at a similar rate – gaining 80% of its final temperature within 30 minutes. Cars that started out comfortable 22°C, for example, rocketed to over 47°C after 60 minutes in the sun. And keeping the windows open a crack hardly slowed the rise at all.
Young children and infants are much more susceptible to heat illnesses than adults, write the authors, meaning that such temperatures could prove dangerous. Toddlers’ body temperatures rise faster and they lose proportionally more water than adults in hot weather, for example.
The team suggest that laws against leaving kids in cars could help to raise awareness of the danger. But they note that because these heat-related deaths are mostly unintentional, additional public education is probably the best way to decrease the number of these preventable tragedies. "
Hmm..This is quite serious, especially for Singapore, where it is a tropical and warm country.Sometimes when my mum leaves me in the car for a while to get something, I do feel realli realli warm even with the door open on my side or with the window open. So, yea,there should be additional public education for this in every country to raise awareness.
“Even on relatively mild-temperature days, the internal temperature of a vehicle left in the sun quickly gets very warm – the average rise in one hour is 22°C," says lead author Catherine McLaren at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "My guess is that parents would be surprised that leaving children in the car is very much like leaving them in a sauna.”
In 2004, 35 children died of heat stroke in the US after being left unattended in a parked car. Previous research has shown that when ambient temperatures rise above 35°C, sealed cars reach a suffocating 65°C in just 15 minutes.
But research on car heating has all been conducted on hot days – never less than 28°C. So McLaren and her colleagues wanted to test how hot cars could get on cooler days, when the dangers of enclosed vehicles might not be as obvious to parents.
Open windows (sub-heading)
On 16 cloud-free days in Northern California, the team measured a car’s inside temperature at 5 minute intervals for one hour post-parking. Ambient temperatures on the study days ranged from 22°C to 35°C.
They found that, regardless of outside air temperature, the car heated up at a similar rate – gaining 80% of its final temperature within 30 minutes. Cars that started out comfortable 22°C, for example, rocketed to over 47°C after 60 minutes in the sun. And keeping the windows open a crack hardly slowed the rise at all.
Young children and infants are much more susceptible to heat illnesses than adults, write the authors, meaning that such temperatures could prove dangerous. Toddlers’ body temperatures rise faster and they lose proportionally more water than adults in hot weather, for example.
The team suggest that laws against leaving kids in cars could help to raise awareness of the danger. But they note that because these heat-related deaths are mostly unintentional, additional public education is probably the best way to decrease the number of these preventable tragedies. "
Hmm..This is quite serious, especially for Singapore, where it is a tropical and warm country.Sometimes when my mum leaves me in the car for a while to get something, I do feel realli realli warm even with the door open on my side or with the window open. So, yea,there should be additional public education for this in every country to raise awareness.
Researchers strongly urge parents not to leave children alone in parked
cars, no matter how mild the weather.
Saturday, July 02, 2005
How olive oil helps fight breast cancer
Sorry for not updating for a few days..have been studying for my biology exam..Well, I found this article in Discover, June rather helpful and interesting for those of you who like olive oil, heh. So, here goes:
"For decades, epidemiologists have collected evidence showing that a mediterranean diet rich in olive oil offers protection against breast cancer. But they never understood why. Javier Menendez of the Northwestern University School of Medicine recently figured out how it works.
Olive oil is a rich mixture of fatty acids, chiefly oleic acid. When Menendez bathed human breast cancer cells with purified oleic acid, the cells cut production of a cancer-causing gene, HER2, by nearly 50 percent. The fatty acid also increased the effectiveness of Herceptin, a drug made from antibodies that latch onto HER2 proteins and trigger the death of cancer cells.
The HER2 gene is overactive in more than one-fifth of all breast cancer and operates in a host of other tumors that may prove vulnerable to oleic acid. So far, menendez and his collegues have discovered the fatty acid cuts the expression of the gene in ovarian, stomach and colon cancer cell lines. "It will probably turn out to be a universal effect," he says.
The researchers also found that other dietary fatty acids, like the omega-3 fatty acids in fish, can block HER2. It may mean there is an "ultimate molecular mechanism" by which fatty acids in food prevent cancer. Menendez suspects the compounds help the malevolent cells survive and grow, "but when you are getting fatty acids from the diet, the cancer cells fatty-acid factory gets blocked."
Prevention comes in relatively small doses: Olive-oils researchers and health experts recommended 40 to 50 grams of olive oil a day (four to six tablespoons) to help stave off cancers and reduce risk of heart disease. "You can get that very easily in a salad," Menendez says. More of the oil might be necessary to help beat existing breast tumors and other cancers, he says, although just how much is not yet known."
Well, that's a really good discovery. Slowly, as years go by and more and more cancer cures/preventions are discovered, we might not be so afraid of it anymore. The main message is still to have a healthy diet. =)
"For decades, epidemiologists have collected evidence showing that a mediterranean diet rich in olive oil offers protection against breast cancer. But they never understood why. Javier Menendez of the Northwestern University School of Medicine recently figured out how it works.
Olive oil is a rich mixture of fatty acids, chiefly oleic acid. When Menendez bathed human breast cancer cells with purified oleic acid, the cells cut production of a cancer-causing gene, HER2, by nearly 50 percent. The fatty acid also increased the effectiveness of Herceptin, a drug made from antibodies that latch onto HER2 proteins and trigger the death of cancer cells.
The HER2 gene is overactive in more than one-fifth of all breast cancer and operates in a host of other tumors that may prove vulnerable to oleic acid. So far, menendez and his collegues have discovered the fatty acid cuts the expression of the gene in ovarian, stomach and colon cancer cell lines. "It will probably turn out to be a universal effect," he says.
The researchers also found that other dietary fatty acids, like the omega-3 fatty acids in fish, can block HER2. It may mean there is an "ultimate molecular mechanism" by which fatty acids in food prevent cancer. Menendez suspects the compounds help the malevolent cells survive and grow, "but when you are getting fatty acids from the diet, the cancer cells fatty-acid factory gets blocked."
Prevention comes in relatively small doses: Olive-oils researchers and health experts recommended 40 to 50 grams of olive oil a day (four to six tablespoons) to help stave off cancers and reduce risk of heart disease. "You can get that very easily in a salad," Menendez says. More of the oil might be necessary to help beat existing breast tumors and other cancers, he says, although just how much is not yet known."
Well, that's a really good discovery. Slowly, as years go by and more and more cancer cures/preventions are discovered, we might not be so afraid of it anymore. The main message is still to have a healthy diet. =)
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