Rare Gene Mutation Plays Role in Longevity

 

TUESDAY, March 4 (HealthDay News) -- A rare gene mutation that restricts a particular growth factor may be one of the keys to living to 100 and beyond, a new study suggests.

This mutation, which seems to decrease the activity of insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1), results in short stature but longer life. Exactly why this might lengthen someone's life isn't known, but the researchers say the finding might prove useful in developing anti-aging drugs.

"We found that people of a hundred years old have mutations in a gene that is related to the growth hormone pathway," said lead researcher Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. "We think this is important, because that's what now happens in nature. The pony lives longer than the horse, the small dog lives longer than a large dog. Apparently, it's true for humans also."

Interestingly, this particular mutation has been found mostly among women, he added.

It might be possible, given these findings, to develop drugs that can prevent aging and age-related disease, Barzilai noted. "There are drugs being developed to decrease growth hormone in patients with tumors, because sometimes cancer is dependent on growth hormones," he said. "Maybe we can adopt the strategy to slow aging."

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Perceptions: Watch Your Weight, Sure, but Don’t Worry About It

Worrying about weighing too much may be bad for you, no matter how much you actually weigh.

 

Using results from a telephone health survey run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers analyzed data on more than 170,000 men and women nationwide. Among other information about health and lifestyle, all reported height and weight, how much they would like to weigh and how many days in the past month they had felt physically or mentally unhealthy.

The study, to be published in the March issue of The American Journal of Public Health, found that men who wanted to lose 1 percent, 10 percent and 20 percent of their body weight reported 0.05, 0.9 and 2.7 unhealthy days a month, respectively. Women with the same weight-loss desires reported 0.1, 1.6 and 4.3 total unhealthy days a month. The results held even after controlling for age and body mass index.

The authors acknowledge that their findings depend on self-reports, and that women tend to say they weigh less than they do, while men claim to be taller than they are. But controlling for many variables — like diabetes, hypertension and smoking — did not significantly alter the conclusions.

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Hormone users face new cancer risks years later

 

CHICAGO - The first follow-up of a landmark study of hormone use after menopause shows heart problems linked with the pills seem to fade after women stop taking them, while surprising new cancer risks appear.

That heart trouble associated with hormones may not be permanent is good news for millions of women who quit taking them after the government study was halted six years ago because of heart risks and breast cancer.

But the new risks for other cancers, particularly lung tumors, in women who’d taken estrogen-progestin pills for about five years puzzled the researchers and outside experts. Those risks “were completely unanticipated,” said Dr. Gerardo Heiss of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, lead author of the follow-up analysis.

The analysis focused on participants’ health in the first two to three years after the study’s end. During that time, those who’d taken hormones but stopped were 24 percent more likely to develop any kind of cancer than women who’d taken dummy pills during the study.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the cause of the increased cancer risk,” said analysis co-author Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The cancers included breast tumors, which also occurred more frequently in hormone users during the study.

The researchers noted that the increased risks for all cancers amounted to only three extra cases per year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.

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Blood Thinner Might Be Tied to More Deaths

 

By WALT BOGDANICH

Published: February 29, 2008

Amid indications that more people may have died or been harmed after being given a brand of the blood thinner heparin, federal drug regulators said Thursday that they had found “potential deficiencies” at a Chinese plant that supplied much of the active ingredient for the drug.

Baxter International, which makes the brand of heparin associated with the problems, and buys supplies from the Chinese plant, announced that it was expanding a recall to include virtually all its heparin products. Though Baxter produces much of the heparin used in the United States, regulators said the other major supplier would be able to meet the demand.

The Food and Drug Administration said the number of deaths possibly associated with the drug, made from pig intestines, had risen to 21 from 4. But it cautioned that many of those patients were already seriously ill and that the drug might not have caused their deaths.

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Fruit, Vegetable-Rich Diet Halves Lung Disease Risk

 

Date updated: May 15, 2007
Content provided by Health Day

TUESDAY, May 15 (HealthDay News) -- People who follow a "Mediterranean" diet rich in fruit, vegetables, whole grains and fish cut their risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by half, researchers report.

COPD, a lethal combination of emphysema and bronchitis, is expected to become the third leading cause of death worldwide by 2020.

Smoking remains the primary cause of COPD, according to the report in the May 14 online edition of the journal Thorax.

Therefore, "The first message is that people have to stop smoking," said lead researcher Dr. Raphaelle Varraso, from INSERM, Villejuif, France. "And then, that a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and fish may help to reduce risk of COPD."

And, if healthy food can cut the odds for COPD, unhealthy eating could do the opposite, he said. "In smokers and ex-smokers, a diet rich in refined grains, cured and red meats, desserts and French fries may increase the risk of COPD," Varraso said.

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Curry Ingredient May Cut Cardiovascular Risks

 

Date updated: February 27, 2008
Content provided by Health Day

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Curcumin, an ingredient in the curry spice tumeric, can reduce heart enlargement and may lower the risk of heart failure, Canadian researchers say.

The scientists at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre of the Toronto General Hospital tested the effects of curcumin in mice with enlarged hearts (hypertrophy) and found it could prevent and reverse the condition, restore heart function, and reduce scar formation. The study was published in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

If human clinical trials support these findings, curcumin-based treatments may provide a safe and inexpensive new option for patients with heart enlargement, according to the researchers.

They said curcumin works directly in the cell nucleus by preventing abnormal unraveling of the chromosome under stress and preventing excessive abnormal protein production.

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U.S. study shows why winter is ‘flu season’ Coating protects viruses against cold — so they can infe

 

 

updated 1:38 p.m. ET, Sun., March. 2, 2008

WASHINGTON - Influenza viruses coat themselves in fatty material that hardens and protects them in colder temperatures — a finding that could explain why winter is the flu season, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

This butter-like coating melts in the respiratory tract, allowing the virus to infect cells, the team at the National Institutes of Health found.

"Like an M&M in your mouth, the protective covering melts when it enters the respiratory tract," said Joshua Zimmerberg of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who led the study.Read More.......

Regular aspirin may lower colon cancer risk in men

 

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Men who routinely take aspirin seem to be less likely to develop colorectal cancer, according to new research findings. However, the benefit requires the dose of aspirin to be higher than usually recommended for heart health, and to be taken over at least 6 years.

"Long-term data on the risk of colorectal cancer according to dose, duration, and consistency of aspirin therapy are limited," Dr. Andrew T. Chan, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and colleagues write in the medical journal Gastroenterology.

The research team collected data on aspirin use and cancer risk factors every 2 years among more than 47,000 men between 40 and 87 years old at enrollment in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study in 1986. .

During 18 years of follow-up, 975 cases of colorectal cancer were documented.

After adjustment for risk factors, men who reported taking aspirin regularly (at least twice a week) had a 21 percent lower risk of developing colorectal cancer compared with men who were not regular aspirin users.

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Obese patients wait longer for kidney transplants

 

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Extremely obese adults in need of a kidney transplant appear to wait longer for a donor organ than their thinner counterparts do, a study has found.

The findings, according to researchers, suggest there may be a bias in the way donor kidneys are allocated.

Analyzing a decade's worth of national transplant data, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that morbidly obese patients - those who are 100 or more pounds overweight -- on the kidney transplant waiting list were 44 percent less likely to receive a donor organ as normal-weight patients.

There was no similar disparity seen among overweight or mildly obese patients, the researchers report in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

"The results identify a potential bias in organ allocation that is not consistent with the goals of our allocation system," Dr. Dorry L. Segev, the lead researcher on the study, said in a statement.

In the U.S., the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) oversees the allocation of donor organs. Segev and his colleagues based their findings on UNOS data for 132,353 patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplant between 1995 and 2006.

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