Researchers Say Low-Carb Diet Benefits Diabetics
With a continuing epidemic of type 2 diabetes and dwindling resources to combat it, new approaches are clearly needed. Because it is disease of insulin and blood sugar regulation, low-carbohydrate diets have been an obvious choice for diabetic patients but have been resisted by some professionals and agencies in favor of pharmacologic approaches.
Now, medical researchers in Sweden have reported a follow-up study of patients on a low-carbohydrate diet up to 22 months and report stable improvement and reduced need for medication.
The Swedish group, led by Dr. Jorgen Vesti Nielsen, had previously reported on16 obese patients on a 20-percent carbohydrate diet over 6 months. After 22 months, patients continued to show improvement in hemoglobin A1C, a marker for long-term blood-sugar levels in diabetes.
Antidepressants linked to suicide risk in elderly
The risk of suicide among older patients appears to be increased during the first month of therapy with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants, but this increased risk is fairly low, researchers in Canada report.
Dr. David N. Juurlink, of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, and colleagues examined coroner’s data, along with data on prescriptions, physician billing claims and hospitalization, for more than 1.2 million subjects who were at least 66 years of age between 1992 and 2000.
A total of 1138 individuals who suicide were identified and these individuals were closely matched to 4,552 subjects who served as comparison group, according to the team’s report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Smokers with Heavily Lined Faces Run Five Times the Risk of Progressive Lung Disease
Middle aged smokers, who are heavily lined with wrinkles, are five times as likely to have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD for short, suggests research published ahead of print in Thorax.
COPD is an umbrella term for a range of progressive chronic lung diseases, such as emphysema and bronchitis, which block the airways and restrict oxygen flow around the body.
In excess of 1 million people are thought to have COPD in the UK, many of whom have not been diagnosed. And the World Health Organization estimates that it will become the third leading cause of death in the world by 2020.
Parkinson’s patients stomach new drug better than conventional meds
Several studies conducted at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) in Houston show that a new kind of orally disintegrating tablets provides improved symptom relief for patients with Parkinson’s disease. Results are reported in the journal Therapy.
A new form of the medication selegiline, used for years to manage motor complications in Parkinson’s patients, avoids first-pass metabolism and sidesteps compromises to its efficacy and tolerability. The drug is currently awaiting U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for use as an adjunctive therapy to the drug levodopa in the management of the neurodegenerative disease.
“Although a variety of therapeutic options exist, there is a tremendous amount of unmet need in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease,” said co-author Dr. Joseph Jankovic, professor of neurology at BCM and director of the college’s Parkinson’s Disease Center and Movement Disorders Clinic.”
India tightens laws to stop destruction of females
India plans to tighten laws banning prenatal tests to determine the sex of the fetus in a bid to curb the killing of thousands of female fetuses, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said on Wednesday.
India’s Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act—which outlaws doctors from carrying out sex determination tests—has been in force since 1994 but social activists say local authorities lack the will to combat female infanticide.
Besides, families seek sons over daughters and unscrupulous doctors attempt to get around the law, making enforcement difficult, they say.
New test identifies patients who benefit from targeted cancer drugs
The Weisenthal Cancer Group has announced that clinical data published at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) show that a new laboratory test it has developed accurately identified patients who would benefit from treatment with the molecularly-targeted anti-cancer therapies gefitinib (Iressa, AstraZeneca) and erlotinib (Tarceva, Genentech).
The new test, called the EGFRx assay, predicted accurately for the survival of patients treated with the targeted drugs. The finding is important because the EGFRx test, which can also be applied to many emerging targeted cancer drugs, could help to help to solve the growing problem of knowing which patients should receive costly, new treatments that can have harmful side-effects and which work for some but not all cancer patients who receive them.
Larry Weisenthal, M.D., Ph.D., a medical oncologist and developer of the EGFRx assay explains that the new test relies upon what he calls “Whole Cell Profiling” in which living tumor cells are removed from an individual cancer patient and exposed in the laboratory to the new drugs. A variety of metabolic and apoptotic measurements are then used to determine if a specific drug was successful at killing the patient’s cancer cells. The whole cell profiling method differs from other tests in that it assesses the activity of a drug upon combined effect of all cellular processes, using several metabolic and morphologic endpoints. Other tests, such as those which identify DNA or RNA sequences or expression of individual proteins often examine only one component of a much larger, interactive process.
Costs pose hurdle for diabetes monitoring devices
Monitoring systems that can help diabetics better control fluctuations in their blood sugar levels will take time to catch on because they are expensive and insurers are not yet providing coverage for the devices, physicians and analysts said.
Continuous glucose monitors are an important step forward in diabetes care because they provide more frequent readings on blood sugar levels than current finger-stick tests, allowing patients to better manage the condition through diet adjustments and insulin injections, physicians said.
The systems, however, are expensive, due to the cost of their disposable wire-like sensors, which are inserted just under the skin and must be replaced every few days. The sensors measure glucose levels and transmit the data wirelessly to a pager-size receiver.
