What You Need To Know News

Breast cancer would seem to have little to do with migraine headaches. But a study has found the two are connected in one sense: Women who have them are 30% less likely to develop breast cancer compared with women who do not have a history of migraines. The study, from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, examined data from 3,412 postmenopausal women. More than half of the women had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The women were asked whether they had been diagnosed with migraines. The study found that migraine history appeared to reduce the risk of the most common subtypes of breast cancer: estrogen-receptor and progesterone-receptor positive.

Although there is no explanation for the connection, the study, published today in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention, suggests that the same hormones that contribute to breast cancer risk play a role in preventing migraines. For example, it’s been observed that some women who take birth control pills tend to have migraines during the hormone-free week each month. Other women have noted that they are free of migraines during pregnancy, when estrogen levels are high. Estrogen is known to stimulate the growth of hormonally sensitive breast cancer.
Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/11/women-with-migr.html

Testosterone is the only agent known to improve desire and arousal in women, with results from a new international trial suggesting the benefits in the bedroom are significant.

“Women who used the patch experienced twice the number of satisfactory events than women using a placebo patch,” said the lead investigator Professor Susan Davis, from Monash University in Melbourne.

“That’s an exciting development given no other agent has been found to help women.”

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved 814 post-menopausal women worldwide who were given either the male hormone or a dummy patch which is stuck to the stomach and changed twice weekly.

The patch, developed by US drug company Procter and Gamble, is not yet available in Australia.

The women enjoyed half their sexual encounters before the study, but six months on those on the testosterone patch had an extra two satisfying experiences a month, compared with 0.7 among the placebo group.

“We already knew it could work among women taking oestrogen as part of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), but HRT isn’t for everyone so it’s important to know it works alone too,” Prof Davis said.

She said their was a “nervousness” among women in using a male hormone, “but women actually have more testosterone in their blood at any given time than oestrogen”.

The testosterone boost did bring masculinising side-effects however, with a modest increase in unwanted body hair but no change in voice pitch.

Sexual health specialist Professor Basil Donovan, of the University of Sydney, said it was possible side-effects could worsen over time, but overall the results were promising.

“I don’t think they’ll get the same market as (the male anti-impotence drug) Viagra, but it may help many long-term relationships,” Prof Donovan said.

“For a lot of women, the flower of their sexual career is often in their post-menopausal years when they’re no longer busy with work and have met the man they want to be with, and this may be just what they need.”

Younger women who are androgen deficit may also benefit from the patch, he said.

Sex drive can get a natural boost too, with general improvements to health through a better diet, more exercise, less alcohol and fewer life stresses.
Source: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24611195-26103,00.html

Intense exercise training can help normalize muscle metabolism in people with type 1 diabetes, which could result in “clinically important health benefits,” Australian researchers report.

After 7weeks of sprint training, diabetics seemed to burn, or “oxidize,” fat more readily, while accumulating less lactate in their muscle tissue, Dr. Alison R. Harmer of the University of Sydney in New South Wales and her colleagues found. The researchers also found no adverse effects of intense exercise in the study participants, some of whom had poor blood glucose control.

In people without diabetes, high-intensity training can help reduce breakdown of glycogen, a molecule used to store energy in the body, in future bouts of intense exercise. And while lactate accumulates in the muscles with strenuous exercise, leading to fatigue and pain, training can help reduce this accumulation.

Just one study has looked at muscle metabolism in people with type 1 diabetes, the researchers note in the November issue of Diabetes Care. This investigation found that these individuals had less ability to burn energy in their muscle tissue, more fluctuation in glucose metabolism, and greater blood acidity.

To see if their hypothesis that training may help restore normal muscle metabolism for people with type 1 diabetes, the researchers had eight patients with the condition and seven healthy individuals complete 7 weeks of sprint training. Study participants performed 4 to 10 “all out” sprints on an exercise bike three times a week.

Before and after the 7 weeks of training, each study participant cycled to exhaustion. After training, the researchers found, cycling to exhaustion led to less accumulation of lactate in the muscles and blood and slower breakdown of both glucose and glycogen than before training in the diabetic individuals.

“The oxidative adaptations to high-intensity exercise training may confer clinically important health benefits in young patients with diabetes; however, this remains to be established,” Harmer and her team conclude.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE4A49Z220081105

Women who took calcium and vitamin D supplements developed breast cancer at the same rate as women who didn’t take them, a large clinical trial has found, overturning conclusions from previous studies that hinted at benefits from vitamin D.

The study — part of the massive Women’s Health Initiative — followed more than 36,000 post-menopausal women who were randomly assigned to take calcium and vitamin D supplements to see whether the supplements would make a difference in their incidence of hip fracture. Breast cancer and colorectal cancer were secondary outcomes studied by the researchers.

After about seven years, there were 528 cases of breast cancer in the group of women taking calcium and vitamin D compared with 546 cases in the placebo group — a difference not considered statistically significant. Blood tests for vitamin D levels also showed no correlation with breast cancer rates. Women who were already taking the supplements — about the same number in the supplement group and the placebo group — had been allowed to continue doing so.

“The main findings do not support a causal relationship between calcium and vitamin D supplement use and reduced breast cancer incidence, despite the association observed in some epidemiological studies,” the authors, led by Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, write in the online version of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. “Although further study of relationships among calcium plus vitamin D supplement use and breast cancer can be considered, current evidence does not support their use in any dose to reduce breast cancer risk.”

The study is valuable because it is the first rigorous test of vitamin D that accounts for factors the earlier, observational studies were unable to capture, said Dr. Jennifer A. Ligibel, a medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Women who take dietary supplements might be healthier than women who don’t, for example. But there are still questions about vitamin D that need to be answered.

“I think this is an important study. It tells us there is absolutely more work that needs to be done on vitamin D,” Ligibel said in an interview. She was not involved in the study. “I do think the study should put a little bit of brakes on people telling people to take huge doses of vitamin D to prevent cancer.”

In an editorial also appearing in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Corey Speers and Dr. Powel Brown of Baylor College of Medicine praise the study’s design and execution, but suggest further work to see whether the age of the women, the dose of vitamin D they were taking, the calcium they took with it, and the hormone therapy also being studied might have confounded the results.

“The potential health benefits of vitamin D and calcium may yet still have a bright future,” they write.

Few types of food or their components, from fat to carbohydrates to fruits and vegetables, have turned out to have a proven relationship in the development of breast cancer or its recurrence, with the exception of alcohol, which has been linked to increased risk, said Ligibel of Dana-Farber. She tells her patients about preliminary evidence that a diet high in fat might not be the best.

“I think there is a lot to learn in this area still, but I personally do not counsel my patients that they need to make tremendous dietary changes based on the information available,” she said.
Source: http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2008/11/calcium_plus_vi.html

A new study finds striking evidence that children who are obese or have high cholesterol show early warning signs of heart disease.

The study, presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association conference in New Orleans, found that the thickness of artery walls of children and teenagers who are obese or have high cholesterol resembled the thickness of artery walls of an average 45-year-old.

The study, which has not yet been published, was small, involving 70 children ages 6 to 19, and several experts said the results would need to be replicated to be considered conclusive. But they said the method used to measure artery wall thickness was considered a reliable indicator of heart disease risk, usually more reliable than cholesterol levels or other measures. The method, which uses ultrasound, has been applied to children in other studies in the last few years, but experts said this appeared to be the first time that results had been correlated to adults.

“I think this is a red flag,” said the lead author of the study, Dr. Geetha Raghuveer, a cardiologist and associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri Kansas City School of Medicine. “These kids are more similar to middle-aged adults.”

Scientists not involved in the study said the findings supported a growing body of research suggesting that childhood obesity in the United States was likely to result in heart disease as the children age.

“These findings are potentially consistent with predictions that obesity and its complications would result in cardiovascular disease becoming a pediatric illness,” said Dr. David Ludwig, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard, who was a co-author of a 2005 study predicting that obesity could shorten the average child’s lifespan by two to five years. “There are other indications that this might be the case, but much of that has been speculative, so this may well be significant hard data, which has been largely lacking. This is actually looking at the development of atherosclerosis, the process that we know will, if it is not dealt with, lead to heart attack or stroke.”

Childhood obesity is considered an epidemic in the United States, with about 16 percent of children ages 2 to 19 considered obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although the number of new cases of childhood obesity appears to be leveling off, some experts say they are now seeing an increase in Type 2 diabetes in children, which they believe is a consequence of increased obesity.

The Kansas City study was one of several presented at the conference that looked at the link between childhood obesity and heart disease.

A study of 991 Australian children ages 5 to 15 found that children who were obese had greater enlargement of their hearts, as measured by the size of their left atrium, said the study’s leader, Dr. Julian G. Ayer, a heart researcher at the University of Sydney.

Another Australian study, of 150 10-year-olds, found that in the heart pumping process, the left ventricles were slower to untwist in children with a higher body-mass index, a relationship of weight to height, said a co-author of that study, Walter Abhayaratna, a researcher at Australian National University.

“These studies are interesting, imperfect corollary evidence of something we all believe is true,” said Dr. Lee Goldman, a cardiologist who is dean of the faculties of health, sciences and medicine at Columbia University. “The obesity epidemic in adolescents is the biggest adverse time bomb we’ve got going on in coronary diseases. These are high tech ways of adding more evidence.”

Dr. Goldman was a co-author of a study published in December 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine in which a computer model was used to predict whether heart disease deaths in the United States would rise. The authors predicted that by 2035, there would be 100,000 additional cases of heart disease attributed to current instances of obesity in children, an estimate especially noteworthy given that advances in treatment have reduced cardiac deaths in recent years.

Another study published in the same journal at that time further bolstered the link between childhood obesity and heart disease. Analyzing the records of 276,835 Danes who were examined as children in 1930, researchers from Denmark found that the higher the children’s body-mass index in 1930, the greater the chances they would develop heart disease.

While it is too early to know if the current generation of American children will suffer more heart attacks, strokes or other heart problems, or experience them sooner, many heart researchers consider the growing corroboration of links between childhood obesity and heart disease alarming. Still, Dr. Raghuveer said that for the children she studied, hope was not lost.

“A lot of these kids’ arteries, even though they are in the early stages of atherosclerosis, are not hardened or calcified, not really advanced,” she said. “There may be an opportunity to implement lifestyle alterations, be it exercise, be it diet, or perhaps even medication. Perhaps it may be reversed.”

Dr. Raghuveer’s study used an ultrasound method called carotid artery intima-media thickness or CIMT to measure the thickness of the inner walls of the carotid arteries, located in the neck. Scientists, who measure the carotid artery because it is easier to capture images of neck arteries than the coronary arteries directly connected to the heart, say increased thickness in the carotid artery wall indicates greater amounts of fatty plaque in the arteries leading to the heart and brain. When such plaque ruptures, it can result in clots that lead to heart attack or stroke.

Of the 34 boys and 36 girls in the Kansas City study, patients at Dr. Raghuveer’s cardiology clinic at Children’s Mercy Hospital, 40 were obese and 30 were not considered obese but had high levels of LDL or bad cholesterol. Many also had high levels of triglycerides. Their average age was 13; average weight was 140 pounds. Nearly 90 percent were white.

The researchers found that 52 of the 70 participants had a maximum CIMT of at least 0.5 millimeters, a thickness that corresponded with the CIMT of an average 45-year-old or what Dr. Raghuveer called a “vascular age” of 45. She did not measure CIMT in normal-weight children and said there was no standard CIMT chart for children.

Vascular age is “an interesting idea, and I hope it gets out there,” said Dr. Gerald S. Berenson, head of the long-running Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana, who has taken CIMT measurements of children in the last few years.

Dr. Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life program at Children’s Hospital Boston, said that seeing risk factors like CIMT in children was especially worrying because “there’s not only a much longer period of time for it to be damaging the body, but it is also occurring at a stage of life where the body is still forming and the physiological systems are still being fine-tuned.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/health/12heart.html?hp

Some 35,000 men who participated in a major prostate cancer prevention trial are in the process of getting this disheartening—yet not entirely surprising—letter in the mail from the National Cancer Institute. The message: Vitamin E and selenium, long buzzed about for their supposed prostate cancer-fighting properties, have flopped. Flopped hard.

Officials announced this week that they had accumulated enough data to conclude that taking vitamin E or selenium, or even both together, does not prevent prostate cancer. In fact, vitamin E may even slightly increase the risk. Leaders of the trial, called the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial, were also concerned to find that slightly more cases of diabetes arose among men who took selenium. And though officials emphasized to reporters that the increased number of prostate cancer and diabetes cases may have been a coincidence, they aren’t taking any chances. That’s why participants are being told to stop taking the supplements.

I can’t say that I’m shocked. As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, we have been suffering from a certain degree of “vitamania” in the past few decades. Yes, some promising observational studies, which cannot prove cause and effect, done in the late 1980s and 1990s suggested that certain antioxidants, including vitamins A, C, and E, could protect against heart disease, cancer, and other maladies. But it turns out that those original antioxidant studies were misleading, a steady stream of more recent randomized studies that do prove cause and effect have shown. (If you’re interested, New Scientist slogs through some of the disappointing findings on beta carotene, vitamin E, and vitamin C.)

In most instances, the clinical trials have shown that vitamins have no effect and, in some, that they may even cause harm. Still, with the passage of a permissive 1994 law called the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act that allows manufacturers to sell supplements without first proving that they provide health benefits, consumers have been left with a booming supplement industry quick to offer us a slew of supplements for any and every ailment.
Source: http://www.usnews.com/blogs/on-men/2008/10/28/prostate-cancer-throws-vitamin-e-another-strike.html

A WEIGHT-loss pill waiting for approval for use in Australia has been suspended in Europe over concerns it may be linked to suicide and sudden death.

Health officials said the risk of side effects from the drug, Acomplia, outweighed its benefits.

Seven deaths, including a suicide, have been associated with the anti-obesity treatment, which also doubles the risk of psychiatric disorders, the Daily Mail reported today.

Around 2500 adverse reactions have been reported by British patients since it became available to private buyers two years ago.

US authorities refused to approve the drug amid mounting scientific evidence of the suicide dangers.
Acomplia was approved four months ago as a “last-chance” solution on the National Health Service by the British Government’s health body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
Although warnings on packets about the higher risk of depression, anxiety and other serious side effects were strengthened, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has decided to suspend the medicines licence for Acomplia because the “benefits no longer outweigh its risks”, the Daily Mail said.

‘New data from post-marketing experience and ongoing clinical trials indicated that serious psychiatric disorders may be more common than in the clinical trials.’

Acomplia, also known as rimonabant, was licensed for obese people, as well as overweight patients who have type 2 diabetes or cholesterol problems.

The drug’s maker, Sanofi-aventis, said”: The company will comply with the European authorities request to temporarily suspend the marketing authorisation of Acomplia in obese and overweight patients and will make every effort to actively support patients and health care professionals in this process.”

Sanofi-aventis has applied to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration to sell the drug here and a decision was expected early next year.

A spokeswoman for Sanofi-aventis in Australia said those plans were now on hold pending the final decision of the EMA after it receives more data from the company.
Source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24545607-1702,00.html

Analysis of data from several phase I and II clinical trials of a new cancer vaccine has shown it is capable of eliciting an immune response in most patients with bowel, kidney and prostate cancer, and that it may provide clinical benefit.

In a news briefing at the 20th EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics in Geneva (Thursday 23 October), Dr Richard Harrop, vice-president of clinical immunology at Oxford BioMedica, a UK-based biotechnology company – said: “Our exploratory analyses of data from nine different trials of TroVax® demonstrate significant associations between immune responses and overall survival in patients with colorectal cancer, renal cancer and prostate cancer.

“While it is essential that these observations are confirmed in large, randomised studies, collectively the data suggest that TroVax could provide some clinical benefit to cancer patients. In addition, the data show the vaccine is well tolerated by patients.”

TroVax is made up of a modified virus (Modified Vaccinia Ankara (MVA)), which acts as a vehicle to transport a second component, a gene that produces an antigen that is present in most solid tumours, called 5T4. TroVax is injected into patients whose solid tumours have the 5T4 tumour antigen present, so that the vaccine can trigger the body’s natural immune responses to mobilise against 5T4.

“The virus acts as both a ‘vehicle’ to deliver the 5T4 antigen and as an ‘adjuvant’, which helps to ensure we stimulate a strong immune response to the 5T4 antigen,” explained Dr Harrop. “Antibody and cellular responses can occur in response to both the viral vector (MVA) and to the 5T4 antigen.”

The analysis, presented at the symposium in Geneva, looked at data from 189 patients who had taken part in nine trials of TroVax in the UK and USA. The patients received an average of five injections (with a range of 1-12), and it was well tolerated by patients when given either on its own or in combination with other anti-cancer treatments. Of 180 patients tested for antibody responses after vaccination, 88% (159) showed positive responses to 5T4 and 98% (176) showed positive responses to MVA.

The highest levels of antibody responses were detected after an average of two vaccinations for the MVA part of the vaccine and after four for 5T4. Dr Harrop said: “This was expected because MVA is a foreign virus which the immune system responds to more quickly than to a ’self antigen’ such as 5T4.”

He continued: “When looking at the results from all the trials (colorectal, renal and prostate cancer patients), the magnitude of the 5T4-specific antibody response was associated with increased patient survival. Indeed, a doubling of the average number of antibodies in the patients between the first and third injections was associated with a reduction in the relative risk of death of 17%. This effect was strongest in colorectal cancer patients.

“Both the magnitude and the frequency of immune responses elicited against our tumour target (5T4) are exceptionally high and could be considered ‘best in class’. Since cancer vaccines rely on the induction of immune responses to be able to work, this is a very important attribute of TroVax.”

Cancer vaccines have been criticised in recent years because they usually fail to live up to their early promise. Apart from the vaccines against cervical cancer and Oncophage™ (vitespen, approved in Russia for the treatment of kidney cancer), there are no other licensed cancer vaccines. Dr Harrop said there were a number of reasons for this, which included the tools used to assess efficacy, the fact that vaccines on their own are more likely to slow disease progression or clear small tumours rather than cause large reductions in tumour burdens, and the fact that they are probably more likely to work in patients with early stage disease but have to be tested in patients with late stage cancer and large tumour burdens.

“To run a trial in patients with early-stage disease is extremely time-consuming and costly and therefore impossible for most small biotech companies. We are fortunate in this matter in that we have backing from a UK consortium (QUASAR) and our partner sanofi-aventis to run a large (over 3000 patients) phase III study in early stage colon cancer patients. Such a large study would normally be out of the question for a company of our size and is a great opportunity to investigate whether there is a survival advantage in patients treated with TroVax,” he said.

“At this stage we can say that the fact we have been able to identify correlations between the anti-tumour (5T4) immune response and clinical benefit (e.g. increased time to disease progression or increased patient survival) in multiple independent trials for several cancers is very encouraging. It gives a strong indication that the immune response we are inducing with TroVax appears to be doing something which is associated with benefit to the patient.”

In addition to the phase III trial in early stage colon cancer patients, the effect of TroVax is being monitored in a current phase III trial of 733 kidney cancer patients. Although a review by the independent Data Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) in July noted that this study would not meet its pre-defined primary endpoint (overall survival) the DSMB supported continuation of follow-up of the patients.

“We are very hopeful that the ongoing phase III trial in kidney cancer and two planned studies in metastatic colorectal and early stage colon cancer respectively will provide an opportunity to demonstrate that TroVax can provide clinical benefit to patients without the often severe side-effects which are associated with many cancer therapeutics,” concluded Dr Harrop.
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081023195220.htm

Wolfing down your food and eating until your seams are straining could double your risk of becoming overweight, Japanese researchers have found.

A study published in the British Medical Journal this week reveals that men and women who eat rapidly or eat until they are full are twice as likely to be overweight compared to people who eat more sensibly.

People who both eat quickly and eat too much are around three times as likely to be overweight, the researchers found.

They also report that the link between the eating behaviour and overweight remains the same no matter what the actual calorie intake from the food itself.

Co-author of an accompanying editorial, Dr Elizabeth Denney-Wilson, says the study provides more evidence that eating behaviours themselves are a significant promoter of ‘positive energy balance’ - the situation where energy intake is higher than energy spent - and may be contributing to the current obesity epidemic.

Part of the problem is that humans are not very good at knowing when to stop eating, says Denney-Wilson, research fellow at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, University of New South Wales in Sydney.

“Humans are not good at using the cues from their bodies to determine when they’re full,” she says.

“They’re much more likely to use visual cues so if they have a great big portion in front of them they’re likely to eat the lot.”

The researchers suggest these unhealthy eating habits are not necessarily there from birth but instead appear to be learned, or taught.

“It is possible to have children self-regulate their energy intake, and we certainly see that with breast-fed babies who are clearly regulating their own energy intake because they are able to determine when they are full.”

However the dramatic increase in portion sizes and unprecedented availability of food makes it harder to exercise restraint, the researchers say.

“Until recently there was just never more food than people needed, so it was impossible to eat beyond satiety,” says Denney-Wilson.

She says it is possible to overcome this urge to overeat by learning to recognise the cues of fullness, something that health professionals could work on with their patients.

While this is not the first study to suggest a link between fast eating and overweight, Denney-Wilson says the cultural context of the study is particularly surprising, as the Japanese are generally considered to be more ’social’ eaters compared to those in Western nations, where fast food is so readily available and eaten.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/10/22/2398053.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Obesity may increase with each generation because overweight mothers give birth to offspring who have a tendency to become heavier, researchers have claimed.

A team of scientists believe that the genetic mechanisms that control the weight of a baby may be changed if the mother is obese before and during pregnancy.

This change could lead in turn to the baby becoming heavier than normal.

Scientists in Houston, America, made the claim after studying the eating habits of several generations of mice.

Dr Robert Waterland from Baylor College of Medicine, led the study.

He explained: “There is an obesity epidemic in the United States and it’s increasingly recognised as a worldwide phenomenon.

“Why is everyone getting heavier and heavier?

“One hypothesis is that maternal obesity before and during pregnancy affects the establishment of body weight regulatory mechanisms in her baby.

“Maternal obesity could promote obesity in the next generation.”

The team split the mice, all of which had a genetic tendency to overeat, into two groups.

One group was provided with a normal diet while the other was provided with nutrient-supplemented diet.

The nutrients in the supplemented diet encouraged the process of DNA methylation - a chemical reaction that silences genes with the hope that it would render the over-eating gene inactive.

The mice on the normal diet gained weight with each generation while the mice on the altered diet stayed roughly the same size.

Dr Waterland explained: “We wanted to know if, even among genetically identical mice, maternal obesity would promote obesity in her offspring, and if the methyl-supplemented diet would affect this process.

“Indeed those on the regular diet got fatter and fatter with each generation. Those in the supplemented group however, did not.”

Dr Waterland said the research had led the team to believe that the process of DNA methylation plays an important role in the development of the region of the brain that regulates appetite - the hypothalamus.
Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1567852/obesity_may_rise_with_generations/