Category: The Body Electric

Cultured brain grown in lab

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Does brain training really work? Greater expectations require greater evidence

It’s ironic, isn’t it? They’re making all this progress when we’re close to blowing up the planet with climate change:

Scientists at Ohio State University say they’ve grown the first near-complete human brain in a lab.

The brain organoid, if licensed for commercial lab use, could help speed research for neurological diseases and disorders, like Alzheimer’s and autism, Rene Anand, an Ohio State professor who worked on the project, said in a statement Tuesday,

“The power of this brain model bodes very well for human health because it gives us better and more relevant options to test and develop therapeutics other than rodents,” Anand said.

The brain, engineered from adult human skin cells and grown in a dish for 15 weeks, is about the size of a pencil eraser, according to the university. It has the maturity of a 5-week-old fetal brain, and contains 99 percent of the genes in a fully developed human fetal brain.

New hands

~ susie

This story is so amazing and he is such a dear little boy:

In a surgical first, Philadelphia doctors have transplanted donor hands and forearms onto an 8-year-old boy whose own hands were amputated when he was a toddler.

Zion Harvey told NBC News that the groundbreaking 10-hour operation performed earlier this month at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was a dream come true. He can’t wait for the day he holds his little sister with his new hands.

“My favorite thing [will be to] wait for her to run into my hands as I pick her up and spin her around,” he said.

His mother, Pattie Ray, was overcome with emotion as she watched her son being wheeled out of the operating room.

“When I saw Zion’s hands for the first time after the operation I just felt like he was being reborn,” she said. “I see my son in the light I haven’t seen him in five years. It was like having a newborn. It was a very joyous moment for me. I was happy for him.”

A 40-member transplant team led by Dr. L. Scott Levin had practiced extensively on cadavers before attempting the operation — a worldwide first — on a child.

[…] Zion lost his hands and his feet when he was 2 to a life-threatening bacterial infection that also led to a kidney transplant. Because he was already taking immunosuppressant drugs to stop his body from rejecting the kidney, he was a perfect candidate for another type of transplant.

Stem cells may work where painkillers fail

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Nerve pain is intense, debilitating, and, unfortunately, especially difficult to treat due to its resistance to traditional painkillers. Stem cell therapy has shown potential for relieving nerve pain, but our understanding of the relatively new science has remained limited. A recent study from Duke University reveals a key factor in the behavior of stem cells in… Continue reading “Stem cells may work where painkillers fail” →

Overdiagnosed

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been saying this for years. There was even an exodus of readers who were so angry that I was implying their treatment might have been unnecessary — but it could have been. And now, another study, a big one, saying the same thing:

The importance of regular mammograms to ending breast cancer has been widely endorsed by everyone from a government-backed panel to patient advocacy groups and Angelina Jolie. Is it possible they’ve all been wrong?

A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine published Monday looked at data from 16 million women in 547 U.S. counties in 2000. More than 53,000 were diagnosed with breast cancer that year. As expected, the researchers found that the number of breast cancer diagnoses rose with more aggressive screenings. The surprise: the number of deaths remained the same.

The study found that mammography resulted in diagnosis of additional small cancers, but was not associated with higher detection of more advanced and dangerous larger tumors. The researchers — including Richard Wilson, a professor at Harvard University who has been conducting a series of studies on risk-benefit analysis and cancer — argued that these findings “suggest widespread overdiagnosis.”

The issue of overdiagnosis (and overtreatment) in cancer care — not just in breast cancer but also in cancers of other regions of the body such as the prostate and lungs — has prompted heated debate in recent years. One big issue in breast cancer specifically is the number of false positives in mammograms, which are estimated to be anywhere from less than 10 to 50 percent of all women who are screened. In an opinion piece accompanying the Wilson study, researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine expressed concern that that this lack of clarity has left both patients and their caregivers in a conundrum.

“Treatment of an overdiagnosed tumor cannot provide benefit, but it can lead to harm. Overdiagnosis and overtreatment are now widely acknowledged to be an important harm of medical practice, including cancer screening,” Joann G. Elmore and Ruth Etzioni wrote.

Just last month, researchers from the University of Copenhagen warned of the psychological strain of false-positive mammograms in a study in the journal Annals of Family Medicine. They found that even when women are told that the initial diagnosis was wrong, they still show signs of stress and depression several years later.

This is a BFD

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Marijuana doctor RI now Providing your information

So many people can be helped. I’m really happy to hear this. I imagine anyone who’s seen a loved one suffer through cancer will support this:

The White House today lifted a longstanding restriction on medical marijuana research, giving a green light to a growing group of mainstream scientists who are interested in investigating the potential health benefits of pot. Such research will no longer have to undergo review by the Public Health Service, a process that is ostensibly meant to ensure the use of scientifically valid clinical trials, but in practice has served as a barrier to launching studies. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, and even opponents of legalization, had called for the requirement to be lifted.

“This announcement is a pretty big deal,” says Christopher Brown, a spokesperson for Americans for Safe Access, a group that advocates for access to pot for medical research. “You have a lot of interest in experimental research on medical cannabis and this shows that you are starting to see policies aligned with that.”

The announcement comes a few months after US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy signaled the federal government’s shifting thinking on medical pot, telling CBS This Morning that preliminary data shows that “marijuana can be helpful” for some medical conditions.

Still, Americans for Safe Access is calling for the feds to loosen restrictions even more. Numerous startup companies are interested in capitalizing on the medical benefits of pot, but scientists who want to use marijuana for research currently must obtain it from a DEA-approved grow facility, a process that can take a year or longer if they need specific cannabis strains. And marijuana remains classified under Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, a category reserved for drugs that supposedly have no medical benefit.

Yay, I guess

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Pills-by-Sarah-MacMillan-Creative-Commons

So as women living alone age, we’re going to drug them up because it’s cheaper than providing support services and higher Social Security payments?

According to a new study, women experiencing difficulty with time management, attention, organization, memory, and problem solving – often referred to as executive functions – related to menopause may find improvement with a drug already being used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania is the first to show that lisdexamfetamine (LDX) improved subjective and objective measures of cognitive decline commonly experienced in menopausal women. Results of the study are published online today in the journal Psychopharmacology.

“Reports of cognitive decline, particularly in executive functions, are widespread among menopausal women,” said lead author, C. Neill Epperson, MD, professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Women’s Behavioral Wellness. “There are approximately 90 million post-menopausal women living in the US alone, and with the average age of onset occurring at 52, the great majority of those women will live in the postmenopausal state for at least one-third of their lives. Therefore, promoting healthy cognitive aging among menopausal women should be a major public health goal.”

News you can use

~ susie

Prilosec OTC, Walmart 8/2014 by Mike Mozart of TheToyChannel and JeepersMedia on YouTube. #Prilosec

I stopped taking these a couple of years ago, when I read about what they do to your intestinal bionome:

A novel data-mining project reveals evidence that a common group of heartburn medications taken by more than 100 million people every year is associated with a greater risk of heart attacks, Stanford University researchers reported Wednesday.

After combing through 16 million electronic records of 2.9 million patients in two separate databases, the researchers found that people who take the medication to suppress the release of stomach acid are 16 percent to 21 percent more likely to suffer myocardial infarction, commonly known as heart attack.

Because of its design, the study could not show cause and effect, but the researchers did claim that if their technology had been available, “such pharmacovigilance algorithms could have flagged this risk as early as the year 2000.”

The link between the drugs, known as proton pump inhibitors, and heart attacks is strong enough that “we do think patients should think about their risks and benefits and should discuss their risk with their doctors,” said Nicholas J. Leeper, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine and vascular surgery at Stanford, and one of the authors of the study. The danger extends to people outside high-risk groups, such as the elderly.

Big oopsie on Lyme disease

~ susie

Well it's that time of the year again!?!? Summer is almost here and for those of you that live near woods, know the havoc that ticks can wreak! Whether it's natural, synthetic, oral or topical, how do you defend your dog against these pesky insects? #deer

Wow. There was yet another major assault on Lyme victims by the medical establishment about six months ago, insisting none of this was true. Why, you would almost think patients could be trusted to tell the truth!

Bad news first? Mistakes were made counting Lyme disease cases. Big mistakes. According to the CDC, its previously reported numbers were short by a factor of 10. The more accurate total is 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease per year.

More bad news? In multiple studies, antibiotics typically used to treat Lyme disease have been proven to not eradicate all of the Lyme bacteria in animals. More recently, these same antibiotics, doxycycline and amoxicillin, were also proven to be unable to kill all of the Lyme bacteria in the lab.

In other words, people treated for Lyme disease based on the Infectious Diseases Society of America treatment guidelines may continue to suffer from symptoms caused by an active infection.

It is reported drugs with the highest activity against Lyme persisters do not work against the actively growing spirochetes that cause Lyme disease, according to Lucy Barnes, director of Lyme Disease Education and Support Groups of Maryland. This means to kill all of the Lyme bacteria in its various stages a combination of drugs would be necessary for an undetermined length of time.

The good news? A follow up study published by Johns Hopkins confirmed eradication of the Lyme bacteria in the lab was achieved using a combination of three drugs — daptomycin, cefoperazone and doxycycline.

People with Lyme disease who experience symptoms after standard treatment now have a legitimate reason for their complaints, an ongoing infection.

Many patients treated by the IDSA’s insurance friendly protocols were mistakenly told they were cured and were denied further treatment even when suffering from continuing, relapsing or worsening symptoms. Many were reported to be malingerers, or were inappropriately referred for mental health counseling, or were prescribed anti-inflammatory medications and told to begin an exercise program, or worse yet, were prescribed steroids to mask their symptoms, rather than receiving appropriate antimicrobial treatment for a chronic, disabling and sometimes life-threatening infectious disease, Barnes said.

With Lyme tests still missing 75 percent of those who are infected, many of these people have since been misdiagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, MS, Parkinson’s, ALS, anxiety, heart conditions, depression, ADD, autism, cancer, arthritis and a host of other conditions with no known cause and no known cure. Chances are good that a new combination of FDA approved drugs already on the market may help those with chronic Lyme and other maladies that mimic the later, more expensive and extensive, disabling stages of Lyme disease, Barnes said.

I couldn’t even get treated the first time when, despite having all the classic symptoms (including the bite ring), the highly inaccurate blood tests kept coming back negative. God only knows what the little bastards have done to me after all these years.