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Health and Medicine - Diet and Health

Body’s Immune System Enlisted to Fight Cancer

September 15th 2008 15:00
Antibodies' recognition of and attachment to cell proteins
City of Hope - Link

It seems these days that cancer has become a pervasive and uniquely devastating disease. While many new treatments are being researched, chemotherapy and radiation remain at the fore of treatment options. Although still in clinical trials, City of Hope is attempting to circumvent the use of these devastating treatments with a better one: immunotherapy. This technique is elegant in that it pushes the body to do what it should be doing on its own, fight the cancer. The immune system is usually triggered when it recognizes something different, or foreign in the body. These foreign objects, whether bacterial, viral proteins or something else, are marked as “non-self”, or not natural to the human body, and are destroyed. Unfortunately, what makes the immune system so effective also causes its downfall when it comes to cancer. Since cancer is caused by the body’s own cells losing control and replicating nonstop, nothing is foreign. There is nothing to trigger the immune system to say, “this doesn’t belong”. The cells do belong, there are just too many of them, allowing the defense system to remain dormant.

Immunotherapy tries to correct this by forcing the immune system to recognize and attack the unruly proliferation of cells. Although there are several ways to accomplish this, one way uses antibodies developed specifically to a protein made only by cancer cells. Once a patient has been given these antibodies, they circulate through the body and are drawn, like magnets, to the cancer cells and the proteins they make. Like magnets of opposite polarity, the antibody and protein latch on to one another. In essence, this marks the cancer cell and stimulates the body’s immune system. This antibody marking allows the immune system to finally “see” the cancer cells. When this occurs, the cancer cells can be destroyed exclusively, without harming adjacent healthy, normal cells.


While several immunotherapy techniques of this sort are still in clinical trials, the possibility of a cancer-cure seems closer than ever. Within a few years or the next decade, cancer may become a domesticated problem rather than a feral beast.

Source: Scientific American Special Edition, September 2008, Vol 18, Num 3
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Get Trim Laying on the Couch!

September 12th 2008 15:00

If you just can’t get that “get up and go” feeling, you’re not alone. There has been a consistent rise in adult and child obesity over the past decades. In fact, 66% of the U.S. population is considered overweight. Fortunately, a new pill has been created which could help make your muscles more efficient, allowing more calories to be burned while doing nothing more than sitting on the couch.

This new pill combines a protein, which activates genes that are normally only turned on during exercise, and an enzyme which fools the body into believing it is exercising even when it isn’t. When this pill was fed to mice, they were able to run 44% farther and 23% longer than before the pill. This is fairly amazing considering they had to do nothing more than chew a pill to increase the distance they could run by almost 50%. In fact, after four weeks of taking the pill, their bodies acted as if they had been exercising every day, when in fact, they had been sedentary.

A pill such as this could help those with diseases which prevent them from exercising. It could also help those trying to lose weight to do it faster and with less stress and pain. “No pain, no gain” could become “no pain but all the gain”. While this type of pill won’t magically convert fat cells to muscle cells, it would make more efficient muscle cells. These could burn more calories continuously throughout the day, which could help reduce a waistline, especially if combined with even slight amounts of exercise and even a moderately decent diet. Even though this is still being tested and not on the market as yet, the hope it could bring to many people's lives could have it flying off the shelves when introduced into the market.
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New Method Allows Ovarian Cancer Patients to Have Children

September 11th 2008 13:33
Many girls and women who are struck with ovarian cancer lose their ability to have children due to a hysterectomy surgery or the intense treatment they undergo. Dr. Jacques Donnez has now found a way to preserve the ovarian tissue of these young girls and women before their ovaries are destroyed.

Typically, the tissue itself won’t survive the freezing that must occur to preserve the tissue unless it has been fertilized by a male. This is often not an option for women without a partner or girls who are already traumatized by their disease and upcoming treatment. Donnez, however, has found a way to sample the ovarian tissue without fertilization, freeze it and re-implant the tissue years later, when the patient has recovered.

So far, Donnez has published an article describing five women who underwent this procedure. Ranging from 21 to 28, the five women had their ovarian tissue sampled and preserved. The tissue was preserved by freezing it at -196°C and keeping it in this state for five years, until doctors could be sure the patients were healthy and that their cancer had not recurred.

After this ovarian tissue was re-implanted at least five years later, it began to function normally in approximately four to five months. In 2004 Donnez published an article announcing one of these women had become pregnant 11 months after the surgery to re-implant her ovarian tissue. She went on to give birth to a healthy baby girl. Although Donnez cautions that this procedure works best on women younger than 35 years old, he believes it holds much hope for future ovarian cancer patients.

So far, six healthy pregnancies have been reported throughout the world. Donnez hopes that more doctors will accept this technique as an ethically imperative one which will allow women to preserve their ability to have children and as a result, begin suggesting the treatment more rigorously.
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Kidney Stone Victims Set to Increase

September 9th 2008 17:00

If you’ve ever had a kidney stone you know they are viciously painful. Caused by the crystallization of minerals in urine, kidney stones are typically left to pass through the body naturally. Since they can form with hooks and spikes, they can cause their victims to feel as if they are being shredded inside. Unfortunately, according to Dr. Tom Brikowski at the University of Texas at Dallas, the number of occurrences of kidney stones will increase in the future.

Kidney stones are helped to form when a person is dehydrated. Dehydration is most often a problem in hot climates, where the sun causes the population to sweat more and lose water. In fact, in the southern part of the U.S., the incidence of dehydration is 50% greater than in the northern parts of the country. Even soldiers are feeling the effects of the heat in the deserts overseas. Only 90 days after being sent to these hot climates, some soldiers were having problems with kidney stones.

Considering the global temperature is predicted to rise two to five degreed by the end of this Century, scientists are expecting to see 1.6 to 2.2 million more patients afflicted with stones by only 2050. Even worse than the pain is the anticipated rise in costs calculated to be around of $1.3 billion in medical care. We may or may not be able to change our future climate, but whatever occurs, our life will most likely change.

Source: Scientific American, Sept 2008; National Academy of Sciences, July 15, 2008
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More Problems Getting Off Nicotine

September 8th 2008 16:22
As most people know, tobacco causes serious health problems to those who smoke as well as to those who are simply around second-hand smoke. It appears that some of the new drugs developed to help ease smokers quit are almost worse. Chantix, which was the first such smoking cessation aid, has been prescribed 6.5 million times since its release in 2006. Developed by Pfizer, this drug has since been connected to a multitude of severe side-effects such as psychosis, seizure and suicide brought on by uncontrollable depression. In fact, the Institute of Safe Medication Practices noted 988 side-effects, varying in severity, in May 2008.

One reason these reactions are so diverse is because Chantix is the first drug of its kind – it operates in a completely new way than other drugs on the market. This drug was developed to go straight for the receptors on brain cells surfaces. These receptors control a variety of extremely important emotional and perception balances such as “pain, mood, memory, attention and…cognitive functions.” In fact, these receptors are so pervasive in the proper functioning of the body that other companies are looking to target them with similar drugs to help with otherwise difficult to treat disease such as Alzheimer’s, ADHD, Parkinson’s, and depression.

Regardless of how much drugs of this nature can help those faced with sickness and addiction, more study and perfection of these drugs is needed if patients are to be helped and not simply have their problem compounded.

Source: Scientific American, Sept 2008
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