Low-carb Diet Aids Diabetic Patients

Dietary restriction, in conjunction with the anti-diabetic drugs metformin and liraglutide, is effective in patients with advanced diabetes.

Diabetes and obesity go hand in hand. The epidemic is rampant globally, engulfing both developed and developing countries. Westernized eating habits and lifestyle are the factors predominantly held responsible for this. Diets with low fat content and high amounts of carbohydrates are recommended by official guidelines although these have never been proved effective. A diet restricted in fat content and enriched in carbohydrates have not shown any effect in reducing heart disease connected with diabetes.

Reducing weight is an effective intervention to treat type 2 diabetes but this is difficult to achieve. Diabetic patients are often put on insulin and this cause an increase in body weight. Increased body weight further elevates the required doses of insulin injections. High insulin doses have also known to produce poor metabolic results.

Carbohydrate-rich diet is not good for the heart either. It results in raised levels of triglycerides and small dense LDL (bad-cholesterol) and low levels of HDL (good-cholesterol). Such an altered lipid profile increases the risk of heart diseases. It would therefore be wiser to adhere to a carbohydrate-restricted diet rather than the standard low fat-high carbohydrate intervention.

Liraglutide belongs to the recently introduced group of antidiabetic drugs called GLP-1 analogues. GLP-1 analogues facilitate weight reduction by inducing satiety. They also avoid hypoglycemia, a common side effect of anti-diabetic medications. Another drug called metformin is commonly used orally to treat type 2 diabetes.

Forty patients with advanced diabetes, who failed to improve even on two oral anti-diabetic drugs or insulin treatment, were enrolled in a recent 24-weeks trial. The ongoing treatment was modified. Insulin and the oral anti-diabetic drugs (except metformin) were stopped. The patients were put on a carbohydrate-restricted diet and a combination of metformin and liraglutide. They were reviewed during follow-up visits at one, two, three and six months.

Thirty-five patients completed the study. A drop in HbA1c (an important marker of the diabetic status, values lower than 7.0% are good) and body weight were noticed in most of the participants. Patients were all satisfied with the treatment. Lipid profile remained largely unaffected.

The trial was designed as proof-of-concept study without control group. This may also be viewed as a limitation of the study. However the study finding brings good news to diabetic patients since it enables reduction in medications. Patients with short duration of diabetes are benefited better. Low carb-diets alone or in conjunction with metformin may be used to treat newly diagnosed diabetes type 2 showing HbA1c values of around 9%.

Patients with long lasting diabetes whose standard treatments failed to produce metabolic control could now possibly switch to this alternative diet regimen, after consulting their physicians.


Source-Medindia

Study Offers Hope To Reverse Aging in MS Patients

A new research has suggested the possibility of reversing aging in the central nervous system in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).

In multiple sclerosis, the insulating layers that protect nerve fibers in the brain, known as myelin sheaths, become damaged. The loss of myelin in the brain prevents nerve fibers from sending signals properly and will eventually lead to the loss of the nerve fiber itself.

However, early in the disease, a regenerative process, or remyelination, occurs and the myelin sheaths are restored. Unfortunately, as people with MS age, remyelination decreases significantly, resulting in more nerve fibers being permanently lost.

However, the latest study in mice shows that the age-associated decline in the regeneration of the nerve's myelin sheath, or remyelination, is reversible.

The proof of principle study demonstrates that when old mice are exposed to the inflammatory cells (called monocytes) from young mice, the ageing remyelination process can be reversed.

"What we have shown in our study, carried out in collaboration with Dr Amy Wagers and colleagues at Harvard University, is that the age-associated decline in remyelination is reversible," said Professor Robin Franklin, Director of the MS Society's Cambridge Center for Myelin Repair at the University of Cambridge.

"We found that remyelination in old adult mice can be made to work as efficiently as it does in young adult mice.

"For individuals with MS, this means that in theory regenerative therapies will work throughout the duration of the disease. Specifically, it means that remyelination therapies do not need to be based on stem cell transplantation since the stem cells already present in the brain and spinal cord can be made to regenerate myelin - regardless of the patient's age," he stated.

The study has just published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Source-ANI

Research Proves PET's Efficacy in Detecting Dementia

After a decade of research, scientists have finally confirmed that a method of positron emission tomography (PET) safely and accurately detects dementia, including the Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers reviewed numerous PET studies to evaluate a molecular imaging technique that combines PET, which provides functional images of biological processes, with an injected biomarker called 18F-FDG to pinpoint key areas of metabolic decline in the brain indicating dementia.

Having physiological evidence of neurodegenerative disease by imaging patients with PET could give clinicians the information they need to make more accurate diagnoses earlier than ever before.

"The new data support the role of 18F-FDG PET as an effective addition to other diagnostic methods used to assess patients with symptoms of dementia," said Nicolaas Bohnen, MD, PhD, lead author of the study and professor of radiology and neurology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

"The review also identified new literature showing the benefit of this imaging technique for not only helping to diagnose dementia but also for improving physician confidence when diagnosing a patient with dementia. This process can be difficult for physicians, especially when evaluating younger patients or those who have subtle signs of disease," he stated.

Physicians can use FDG-PET with high accuracy to not only help diagnose dementia but also differentiate between the individual disorders. The role molecular imaging plays in the diagnosis of dementia has expanded enough that the official criteria physicians use to diagnose patients now includes evidence from molecular imaging studies.

After reviewing 11 studies that occurred since the year 2000 and that met more stringent study review standards, researchers conclude that 18F-FDG is highly effective for detecting the presence and type of dementia.

"Using 18F-FDG PET in the evaluation of patients with dementia can improve diagnostic accuracy and lead to earlier treatment and better patient care," said Bohnen.

"The earlier we make a diagnosis, the more we can alleviate uncertainty and suffering for patients and their families," he added.

This research is featured in the January issue of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

Source-ANI

Air Pollution Raises Diabetes, High Blood Pressure Risk In Black Women

Exposure to nitrogen oxides in air causes increased risk of type 2 diabetes and hypertension in African-American women, a new study has revealed.

Researchers from the Slone Epidemiology Center (SEC) at Boston University assessed the risks of incident hypertension and diabetes associated with exposure to nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM2.5) in a cohort of approximately 4,000 African American women living in Los Angeles.

NOx are indicators of traffic-related air pollution. From 1995-2005, 531 incident cases of hypertension and 183 incident cases of diabetes occurred among the participants in the Los Angeles area.

The risk of diabetes increased by a significant 24 percent, and the risk of hypertension by 11 percent, for each 12 ppb increase in exposure to NOx. There also were suggestive increases in risks of both diseases associated with exposure to (PM2.5), but the evidence for this was weaker than for NOx.

"A link between air pollution and the risks of diabetes and hypertension is of particular importance to African American women, because the incidence of both conditions is almost twice as high in African American women as in white women and African Americans live in more highly polluted areas than white Americans," said Patricia Coogan, D.Sc., the study's lead author," Coogan said.

"In addition, even a modest effect of air pollutants on the risks of hypertension and diabetes will have significant public health impact due to the high incidence of these conditions and the ubiquity of exposure to air pollution," she added.

The study has been published online in the journal Circulation.

Source-ANI

Hepatitis B Carrier Exchanges Roses For Kisses

Zhang Wen, dressed in a low-backed wedding dress, stood at Guanggu Square in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province, on January 3.

Shivering in the cold wind, she held 10 roses and asked for kisses from male passers-by, with a friend standing nearby holding a board saying, 'Kiss me for a rose in exchange'.

It also said 'I'm an HBV (hepatitis B virus) carrier, I also long for love'.

According to Changjiang Times, Wen is 30 and unmarried. Ten roses were handed out within one hour in exchange for kisses, China Daily reported.

She also got hugs from passers-by who were moved by her courage and honesty.

The event was to raise awareness about the misunderstanding and discrimination against HBV carriers and letting people know that HBV is not so horrible.

Source-ANI

Lahore Launches Ladies-Only Buses To Curb Sexual Harassment

Three pink buses with female collectors but male drivers plied on three routes at standard ticket prices on January 5.

First Bus Service chief Muhammad Dastgir said the new venture aims at offering harassment-free travel to women, The Express Tribune reports.

He said the three buses would run from 6:30am to 7:30pm daily with ticket prices ranging between 15 and 35 rupees but fixed ten-rupee fare for students.

A Pakistani college student, Amna, lauded the project pointing out that women brave unwanted gazes from men everyday.

Kashf Foundation's gender empowerment and social advocacy assistant manager Nasir Mumtaz welcomed the project but called on the government to increase the number of buses and rope in private players.

The First Bus Service presently has over a hundred buses, including 38 CNG ones.

Source-ANI

Death Toll From Cholera Nears 7,000 in Haiti

Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, said that as of December, on top of the deaths, the Haitian government had reported more than 520,000 cholera cases with 200 new sufferers appearing each day.

Andrus said it was "one of the largest cholera outbreaks in modern history to affect a single country."

There are also 21,000 cases in the neighboring Dominican Republic where there have been 363 deaths, Andrus said at a briefing for the second anniversary of the January 12, 2010 earthquake which killed more than 225,000 people.

The cholera outbreak erupted in October, 2010 and has been widely blamed on a camp of UN peacekeepers from Nepal. Lawyers representing victims have demanded the United Nations pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.

Andrus said Haiti needed a huge campaign to improve its supply of drinking water which various international institutions had estimated could cost between $746 million and $1.1 billion.

The international community has already given impoverished Haiti $2.4 billion in humanitarian aid in response to the quake.

Rebeca Grynspan, a UN under-secretary general at the UN Development Programme, said about 50 percent of the quake debris had been cleared -- some five million cubic meters of concrete and tangled steel.

Source-AFP

BMI Method UrgeBMI Method Urged for Treating Children With Eating Disorders

An exact determination of expected body weight for adolescents based on age, height and gender is critical for diagnosis and management of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia. However, there are no clear guidelines regarding the appropriate method for calculating this weight in children with such disorders.

In a study to be published online Jan. 4, 2012, in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of Chicago, the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Rochester Medical Center compared three common methods for calculating expected body weight of adolescents with eating disorders and found that the body mass index (BMI) percentile method is recommended for clinical and research purposes.

"There are no clear guidelines in the adolescent field," said study author Daniel Le Grange, PhD, professor of psychiatry and Director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of Chicago. "We set out to do something that is relatively straightforward that hasn't been done before, and that is look at some of the most frequently used methods of calculating weight in the pediatric and adolescent eating disorder populations, and see whether we can come up with a gold standard for clinical as well as for research purposes."

Le Grange and his colleagues analyzed data from adolescents seeking treatment for eating disorders at the University of Chicago. They calculated expected body weights using the BMI method along with two other commonly used measures: the McClaren and Moore methods. The BMI method compares a patient's current BMI to the 50th percentile BMI for a patient of the same age, height and gender according to charts published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That percentage can help determine whether a patient has an eating disorder.

Their analysis showed that of the three, the BMI method was the most useful for children and adolescents of all ages, heights and weights, and could account more accurately for very short and very tall patients as well.

By publishing their study in Pediatrics, the premier journal in the pediatric community, Le Grange hopes to reach a wider audience of pediatricians who may not be as familiar with eating disorders. "Pediatricians are at the forefront of making these diagnoses," he said. "We wanted to make a clear statement to the pediatric and adolescent eating disorder community that we should all talk the same language and move forward in this way."

The study also recommends that researchers cite the method used to calculate expected body weight in their research and stresses the importance of using the term "expected" instead of "ideal" to describe body weight to avoid unrealistic body image expectations in patients with eating disorders. "I think it's a good clear clinical guide, and I hope pediatricians in the community feel they can pick it up and have a handy tool in their clinical practice," Le Grange said.

Source-Eurekalert

Statins Linked To Lung Abnormalities In Smokers

While some studies have suggested that statins might be beneficial in the treatment of fibrotic lung disease, others have suggested that they may contribute to the progression of pulmonary fibrosis by enhancing secretion of inflammasome-regulated cytokines, and numerous case reports have suggested that statins may contribute to the development of various types of ILD.

"Based on earlier case reports of statin-associated ILD and data suggesting that smoking is associated with the interstitial lung abnormalities (ILA) which underlie ILD, we hypothesized that statins would increase the risk for ILA in a population of smokers," said George R. Washko MD, MMsC, and Gary M. Hunninghake MD, MPH, of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at Brigham and Women''s Hospital in Boston. "Accordingly, we evaluated the association between statin use and ILA in a large cohort of current and former smokers from the COPDGene study. In addition to the association between statin use and ILA we found in humans, we also demonstrated that statin administration aggravated lung injury and fibrosis in bleomycin-treated mice." Bleomycin has been shown to induce lung inflammation and fibrosis.

The findings were published online ahead of print publication in the American Thoracic Society''s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Assessment included pulmonary function testing and CT scanning for radiologic features of ILA. Among 1,184 subjects with no evidence of ILA, 315 (27%) used statins, compared with 66 of 172 (38%) subjects with ILA. After adjustment for a number of covariates, including a history of high cholesterol or coronary artery disease, statin users had a 60 percent increase in the odds of having ILA , compared to subjects not taking statins. No other positive associations between ILA and cardiovascular medications or disorders were detected. The association between statin use and ILA was greatest with statins with higher hydrophilicity (readily absorbed or dissolved in water), such as pravastatin, and in higher age groups.

The effects of statins on lung injury and fibrogenesis were also examined in a study in mice, which were pretreated with pravastatin prior to intratracheal bleomycin administration. Statin use was found to exacerbate bleomycin-induced lung fibrosis. In a further in vitro study, statin pretreatment was shown to enhance Nlrp3-inflammasome activation through mitochondrial reactive oxygen species generation in macrophages. "These results implicate activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome in fibrotic lung disease," said Jin-Fu Xu MD, and Augustine M. K. Choi, MD, of the Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, Tongji University School of Medicine, in Shanghai, China and the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care at Brigham and Women''s Hospital in Boston, respectively.

There were some limitations to both studies. Findings in the mouse model were not replicated in human samples. All study subjects were current or former smokers, perhaps limiting the applicability of the results to others. Cigarette smoking by itself may lead to pulmonary inflammation. Finally, the duration and dosage of statin therapy was not available for the majority of patients.

"While statin use was associated with ILA in our study, caution should be used when extrapolating these findings to the care of patients," concluded Dr. Hunninghake. "The significant benefits of statin therapy in patients with cardiovascular disease probably outweigh the risk of developing ILA, and statin use may benefit some patients with respiratory disease. Clinicians should be aware, though, that radiological evidence of ILD can develop in some patients treated with statins."

Source-Newswise

Is Talking Back Good for Your Future?

Researchers suggest that parents should see disputes not as a nuisance, but as a "critical training ground" where their offspring can learn life lessons in how to disagree, the Daily Mail reported.

The study conducted at the University of Virginia in the U.S found that those teenagers who were encouraged to express their point of view calmly and confidently were also able to do so with their friends.

As such, those that did so were 40 per cent more likely to say 'no' when offered drugs or alcohol by their peers than those who didn't answer back.

Conversely, those children who backed down from a row because they felt it was pointless to take issue with their parents were more likely to accept the harmful offerings from their mates.

The study recorded 157 13-year-olds on video as they described their biggest slanging matches with their parents.

The interview was then played back to both parent and child.

The teenagers were interviewed again at the ages of 15 and 16.

"It was the parents who said they wanted to talk who were on the right track as we found that what a teen learned in handling these kinds of disagreements with their parents was exactly what they took into their peer world," said Psychologist Joseph P. Allen, who led the research, told National Public Radio.

"We tell parents to think of those arguments not as nuisance, but as a critical training ground," he added.

The findings have been published in the journal Child Development.

Source-ANI

Study Says Love is 'Conditional' for 80 Pc Chinese Women

Over a quarter of women who polled, expected to date men with a monthly income of 10,000 yuan or more, China Daily reported.

According to Lu Xiongyu, who works at an import-and-export company in Beijing, it was only fair that women should want to date men earning 4,000 yuan a month or more.

"Living costs are high in big cities and love cannot be sustained without enough bread," the 27-year-old said.

On the other hand, not every woman puts a condition on a man's economic status while looking for romance.

"Love is not a trade and a lot of women don't need to economically rely on men for a decent life," said Hu Heng, a 25-year-old resident in Guangzhou, Guangdong province.

The survey, which took into consideration more than 50,000 people nationwide aged from 20 to 60, was jointly conducted by the China Association of Social Workers and Baihe.com, a major dating and matchmaking website in China.

Source-ANI

Men are More Conscious About Beer Bellies, Lack of Muscles

About 35 percent of respondents said they would trade a year of their life to achieve their ideal body weight or shape.

The greatest issue men have is with their muscularity, with 60 percent saying that their arms, chests and stomachs were not muscular enough.

This desire for more muscle mass may explain why one in five men questioned was on a high protein diet, and nearly one in three used protein supplements.

The survey also found that 80 per cent of men who responded engaged regularly in conversation about one another's bodies, which researchers referred to as 'body talk'.

"Body talk reinforces the unrealistic beauty ideal which reinforces leanness and muscularity," BBC quoted Dr Philippa Diedrichs, who led the study, as saying.

"Body talk reinforces the unrealistic beauty ideal which reinforces leanness and muscularity

"This is traditionally seen as an issue for women but our research shows that men are feeling the pressure to conform too," she said.

Dr Diedrichs said this was not a case of encouraging obesity, but an attempt to not trivialise negative body image issues.

"We need to take a collaborative approach to promoting an environment that values diversity in appearance and promotes healthy body image," she said.

Source-ANI

New, Non-surgical Skin Cancer Treatment

According to scientists, there are minimal side effects and the treatment does not even leave a scar.

The breakthrough therapy, which has been used on 700 patients in Italy with a success rate of up to 95 percent, could be available in the UK within two years to treat basal cell carcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma.

The treatment is not suitable for malignant melanoma, which is the deadliest form of skin cancer.

The vast majority of those who suffer from less dangerous forms of cancer have surgery to remove the affected tissue.

Other treatments include radiotherapy and "freezing" of the tumours if they are small and superficial.

However, an estimated 3 percent of patients have deep tumours that are difficult to remove surgically because they are on sensitive areas such as the eyes, nose or ears. Others cannot have surgery due to age or medical conditions.

These patients are given radiotherapy, which involves at least ten sessions at a hospital and often results in serious side-effects.

For the new technique, Italian researchers harnessed rhenium-188, a radioactive isotope which was previously rare and expensive but is now being supplied in quantities large enough to treat thousands of patients a week by nuclear physicists at the British-funded Institut Laue-Langevin in France.

The radioactive paste is applied to the tumour area via a piece of surgical foil on the skin

The treatment, which is said to be painless, involves putting a piece of surgical foil on the tumour area, painting on the radioactive paste and removing it one or two hours later.

Researchers believe that the radiation causes healthy skin to re-grow, so that there is no scarring.

In the Italian trial, 85 percent of patients were cured after one treatment and up to 95 per cent after three treatments.

"This means that patients with large and difficult-to-treat tumours not only have hope but keep their quality of life under what would otherwise be dire conditions," the Daily Mail quoted Oliver Buck, chief executive of the German technology firm ITM which developed the therapy as saying.

"These people sometimes have to go through horrible surgery which removes part of their face. By contrast this treatment is generally done in a single non-invasive session," he said.

Trials are now being held in Germany and Australia, and Buck believes that the treatment could be licensed in the UK within two years, which will "certainly" be cheaper than current therapies.

Source-ANI

Smoking Cessation Drugs Make Quitting Easier

The small clinical trial conducted by Larry W. Hawk and his team of researchers from the University at Buffalo Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) focused on 35 women and 25 men, all smokers from Western New York who were on average 48 years old and smoked a pack of cigarettes per day.

The participants who were randomised to take the smoking cessation medication varenicline, marketed as Chantix, for four weeks prior to trying to quit smoking were more likely to successfully quit smoking than those who took varenicline for just one week before quitting, which is the current standard therapy for the drug.

Everyone took the medication for an additional 11 weeks after the quit day.

"Varenicline was designed to make smoking less rewarding, and our data suggests that it does that better when people take it for a few extra weeks before quitting," Hawk, lead author of the study, said.

"We saw nearly full compliance, which suggests that this is not only a well-tolerated therapy, but one people can realistically stick with," Martin C. Mahoney, co-author of the study, said.

According to Mahoney, while many participants reported mild nausea, the researchers found that the symptoms typically dissipated after a couple of weeks and may have helped reduce their desire to smoke.

"Whether through changes in taste or nausea, it seems this extra varenicline reduces smoking rates before people try to quit," Hawk said.

"These changes should make it easier to quit smoking, but we also know that it takes some period of time for this new learning to occur. That's why we decided to see if a longer period of treatment with varenicline before smokers tried to quit would result in better outcomes, and it did in this small study," he said.

Of special interest was the fact that women who took varenicline for four weeks were especially likely to reduce their smoking, possibly because they reported more nausea in the pre-quit period.

After three weeks of treatments with varenicline, women reduced their smoking by more than 50 percent, on average. The men who took the varenicline for four weeks reduced their smoking by 26 percent. The researchers say that much larger studies are needed to tell whether the gender differences are real.

"This study suggests we may be able to take the most effective smoking-cessation treatment we have and make it work 50 percent better, just by giving the medication for a few weeks before smokers attempt to quit," Hawk added.

The study has been published in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

Source-ANI

Inflammation and Depression

Inflammation in the body is common to many diseases, including high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and diabetes. Depression has also been linked to an inflammation marker in blood called C-reactive protein (CRP).

Dr. William Copeland at Duke University Medical Center and his colleagues tested the direction of association between depression and CRP in a large sample of adolescent and young adult volunteers. By following the children into young adulthood, they were able to assess the changes over time in both their CRP levels and any depressive symptoms or episodes.

They found that elevated levels of CRP did not predict later depression, but the number of cumulative depressive episodes was associated with increased levels of CRP.

"Our results support a pathway from childhood depression to increased levels of CRP, even after accounting for other health-related behaviors that are known to influence inflammation. We found no support for the pathway from CRP to increased risk for depression," said Copeland.

These findings suggest that, by this measure, depression is more likely to contribute to inflammation in the body as opposed to arise as a consequence of inflammation in the body.The highest levels of CRP were found in those who had endured the wear and tear of multiple depressive episodes. This suggests the possibility that long-term emotional distress, beginning in childhood, may lay the foundation for inflammatory processes that lead, in middle age, to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

"Depression is a recurring disorder for many people. Thus the finding that repeated episodes of depression contribute to inflammation in the body highlights a potentially important role for untreated depression as a contributor to a range of serious medical problems," commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "These data add to growing evidence of the medical importance of effectively treating depression."

Source-Eurekalert

Proton Therapy Safe and Effective Treatment for Prostate Cancer

Proton therapy, a type of external beam radiation therapy, has been found safe and effective for treating prostate cancer, according to two new studies published in the January issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology•Biology•Physics (Red Journal), the American Society for Radiation Oncology's (ASTRO) official scientific journal.

In the first study, researchers at the University of Florida in Jacksonville, Fla., prospectively studied 211 men with low-, intermediate-, and high-risk prostate cancer. The men were treated with proton therapy, a specialized type of external beam radiation therapy that uses protons instead of X-rays. After a two year follow-up, the research team led by Nancy Mendenhall, MD, of the University of Florida Proton Therapy Institute, reported that the treatment was effective and that the gastrointestinal and genitourinary side effects were generally minimal.

"This study is important because it will help set normal tissue guidelines in future trials," Dr. Mendenhall, said.

In the second study, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Loma Linda University Medical Center in Loma Linda, Calif., and the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group in Philadelphia performed a case-matched analysis comparing high-dose external beam radiation therapy using a combination of photons (X-rays) and protons with brachytherapy (radioactive seed implants).

Over three years, 196 patients received the external beam treatments. Their data was compared to 203 men of similar stages who received brachytherapy over the same time period. Researchers then compared the biochemical failure rates (a statistical measure of whether the cancer relapses) and determined that men who received the proton/photon therapy had the same rate of recurrence as the men who received brachytherapy.

"For men with prostate cancer, brachytherapy and external beam radiation therapy using photons and protons are both highly effective treatments with similar relapse rates," John J. Coen, MD, a radiation oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said. "Based on this data, it is our belief that men with prostate cancer can reasonably choose either treatment for localized prostate cancer based on their own concerns about quality of life without fearing they are compromising their chance for a cure." 

Pollution Ups Diabetes and Hypertension in African-American Women

An increase in the incidence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension with cumulative levels of exposure to nitrogen oxides, was observed in a new study led by researchers from the Slone Epidemiology Center (SEC) at Boston University.

The study, which appears online in the journal Circulation, was led by Patricia Coogan, D.Sc., associate professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Public Health and the SEC.

While it is well established that air pollution increases the risks of acute cardiovascular events such as stroke and myocardial infarction, it is not known whether exposure increases the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension. However, emerging findings from laboratory and clinical studies suggest that air pollution may predispose to both conditions.

Researchers assessed the risks of incident hypertension and diabetes associated with exposure to nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM2.5) in a cohort of approximately 4,000 African American women living in Los Angeles. NOx are indicators of traffic-related air pollution. From 1995-2005, 531 incident cases of hypertension and 183 incident cases of diabetes occurred among the participants in the Los Angeles area. The risk of diabetes increased by a significant 24 percent, and the risk of hypertension by 11 percent, for each 12 ppb increase in exposure to NOx. There also were suggestive increases in risks of both diseases associated with exposure to (PM2.5), but the evidence for this was weaker than for NOx.

According to the researchers, two previous follow-up studies have suggested that traffic-related pollution increased the incidence of diabetes, but no African Americans were included. "A link between air pollution and the risks of diabetes and hypertension is of particular importance to African American women, because the incidence of both conditions is almost twice as high in African American women as in white women and African Americans live in more highly polluted areas than white Americans," said Patricia Coogan, D.Sc., the study's lead author. "In addition, even a modest effect of air pollutants on the risks of hypertension and diabetes will have significant public health impact due to the high incidence of these conditions and the ubiquity of exposure to air pollution," she added. 

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