Doctor Healthy

Eating insects could help fight obesity, U.N. says

Posted by Doctor Healthy at 1:45 AM |

The thought of eating beetles, caterpillars and ants may give you the creeps, but the authors of a U.N. report published on Monday said the health benefits of consuming nutritious insects could help fight obesity.

More than 1,900 species of insects are eaten around the world, mainly in Africa and Asia, but people in the West generally turn their noses up at the likes of grasshoppers, termites and other crunchy fare.

The authors of the study by the Forestry Department, part of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization FAO), said many insects contained the same amount of protein and minerals as meat and more healthy fats doctors recommend in balanced diets.

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"In the West we have a cultural bias, and think that because insects come from developing countries, they cannot be good," said scientist Arnold van Huis from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, one of the authors of the report.

Eva Muller of the FAO said restaurants in Europe were starting to offer insect-based dishes, presenting them to diners as exotic delicacies.
Danish restaurant Noma, for example, crowned the world's best for three years running in one poll, is renowned for ingredients including ants and fermented grasshoppers.

As well as helping in the costly battle against obesity, which the World Health Organization estimates has nearly doubled since 1980 and affects around 500 million people, the report said insect farming was likely to be less land-dependent than traditional livestock and produce fewer greenhouse gases.

It would also provide business and export opportunities for poor people in developing countries, especially women, who are often responsible for collecting insects in rural communities.
Van Huis said barriers to enjoying dishes such as bee larvae yoghurt were psychological - in a blind test carried out by his team, nine out of 10 people preferred meatballs made from roughly half meat and half mealworms to those made from meat.

Smoking – health risks

Posted by Doctor Healthy at 12:56 PM |

You can eat five portions of fruit or veg a day and exercise regularly – but healthy behaviour means little if you continue to smoke.
The message that 'smoking is bad for you' is an old one, so not everyone gives it their full attention.
Below we list the health risks of smoking.
Why quit smoking?
Most people know that smoking can cause lung cancer, but it can also cause many other cancers and illnesses.
Smoking directly causes over 100,000 deaths in the UK each year and contributes to many more.
Of these deaths, about 42,800 are from smoking-related cancers, 30,600 from cardiovascular disease and 29,100 die slowly from emphysema and other chronic lung diseases.
How do cigarettes damage health?

Cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and at least 400 toxic substances.
When you inhale, a cigarette burns at 700°C at the tip and around 60°C in the core. This heat breaks down the tobacco to produce various toxins.
As a cigarette burns, the residues are concentrated towards the butt.
The products that are most damaging are:
tar, a carcinogen (substance that causes cancer)
nicotine is addictive and increases cholesterol levels in your body
carbon monoxide reduces oxygen in the body
components of the gas and particulate phases cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD).
The damage caused by smoking is influenced by:
the number of cigarettes smoked
whether the cigarette has a filter
how the tobacco has been prepared.
Smoking affects how long you live
Research has shown that smoking reduces life expectancy by seven to eight years.

Of the 300 people who die every day in the UK as a result of smoking, many are comparatively young smokers.
The number of people under the age of 70 who die from smoking-related diseases exceeds the total figure for deaths caused by breast cancer, AIDS, traffic accidents and drug addiction.
Non-smokers and ex-smokers can also look forward to a healthier old age than smokers.
Major diseases caused by smoking
Cardiovascular disease
Cardiovascular disease is the main cause of death due to smoking.
Hardening of the arteries is a process that develops over years, when cholesterol and other fats deposit in the arteries, leaving them narrow, blocked or rigid. When the arteries narrow (atherosclerosis), blood clots are likely to form.
Smoking accelerates the hardening and narrowing process in your arteries: it starts earlier and blood clots are two to four times more likely.
Cardiovasular disease can take many forms depending on which blood vessels are involved, and all of them are more common in people who smoke.

Coronary thrombosis: a blood clot in the arteries supplying the heart, which can lead to a heart attack. Around 30 per cent are caused by smoking.
Cerebral thrombosis: the vessels to the brain can become blocked, which can lead to collapse, stroke and paralysis. Damage to the brain's blood supply is also an important cause of dementia.
If the kidney arteries are affected, then high blood pressure or kidney failure results.
Blockage to the vascular supply to the legs may lead to gangrene and amputation.
Smokers tend to develop coronary thrombosis 10 years earlier than non-smokers, and make up 9 out of 10 heart bypass patients.
Cancer
Smokers are more likely to get cancer than non-smokers. This is particularly true of lung cancer, throat cancer and mouth cancer, which hardly ever affect non-smokers.
The link between smoking and lung cancer is clear.
Ninety percent of lung cancer cases are due to smoking.
If no-one smoked, lung cancer would be a rare diagnosis – only 0.5 per cent of people who've never touched a cigarette develop lung cancer.
One in ten moderate smokers and almost one in five heavy smokers (more than 15 cigarettes a day) will die of lung cancer.
The more cigarettes you smoke in a day, and the longer you've smoked, the higher your risk of lung cancer. Similarly, the risk rises the deeper you inhale and the earlier in life you started smoking.
For ex-smokers, it takes approximately 15 years before the risk of lung cancer drops to the same as that of a non-smoker.
If you smoke, the risk of contracting mouth cancer is four times higher than for a non-smoker. Cancer can start in many areas of the mouth, with the most common being on or underneath the tongue, or on the lips.
Other types of cancer that are more common in smokers are:
bladder cancer
cancer of the oesophagus
cancer of the kidneys
cancer of the pancreas
cervical cancer
COPD
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a collective term for a group of conditions that block airflow and make breathing more difficult, such as:

emphysema – breathlessness caused by damage to the air sacs (alveoli)
chronic bronchitis – coughing with a lot of mucus that continues for at least three months.
Smoking is the most common cause of COPD and is responsible for 80 per cent of cases.
It's estimated that 94 per cent of 20-a-day smokers have some emphysema when the lungs are examined after death, while more than 90 per cent of non-smokers have little or none.
COPD typically starts between the ages of 35 and 45 when lung function starts to decline anyway.

In smokers, the rate of decline in lung function can be three times the usual rate. As lung function declines, breathlessness begins.
As the condition progresses, severe breathing problems can require hospital care. The final stage is death from slow and progressive breathlessness.
Other risks caused by smoking

Smoking raises blood pressure, which can cause hypertension (high blood pressure) – a risk factor for heart attacks and stroke.
Couples who smoke are more likely to have fertility problems than couples who are non-smokers.
Smoking worsens asthma and counteracts asthma medication by worsening the inflammation of the airways that the medicine tries to ease.
The blood vessels in the eye are sensitive and can be easily damaged by smoke, causing a bloodshot appearance and itchiness.
Heavy smokers are twice as likely to get macular degeneration, resulting in the gradual loss of eyesight.
Smokers run an increased risk of cataracts.
Smokers take 25 per cent more sick days year than non-smokers.
Smoking stains your teeth and gums.
Smoking increases your risk of periodontal disease, which causes swollen gums, bad breath and teeth to fall out.
Smoking causes an acid taste in the mouth and contributes to the development of ulcers.
Smoking also affects your looks: smokers have paler skin and more wrinkles. This is because smoking reduces the blood supply to the skin and lowers levels of vitamin A.
Smoking and impotence
For men in their 30s and 40s, smoking increases the risk of erectile dysfunction (ED) by about 50 per cent.

Erection can't occur unless blood can flow freely into the penis, so these blood vessels have to be in good condition.
Smoking can damage the blood vessels and cause them to degenerate: nicotine narrows the arteries that lead to the penis, reducing blood flow and the pressure of blood in the penis.
This narrowing effect increases over time, so if you haven't got problems now, things could change later.
Erection problems in smokers may be an early warning signal that cigarettes are already damaging other areas of the body – such as the blood vessels that supply the heart.
Smoking and others
There are many health-related reasons to give up cigarettes – not just for smokers, but to protect those around you.
Babies born to mothers who smoke during pregnancy are twice as likely to be born prematurely and with a low birth weight.
Passive smoking
The 'side-stream' smoke that comes off a cigarette between puffs carries a higher risk than directly inhaled smoke.
Children who grow up in a home where one or both of their parents smoke have twice the risk of getting asthma and asthmatic bronchitis. They also have a higher risk of developing allergies.
Infants under two years old are more prone to severe respiratory infections and cot death.
For adults, passive smoking seems to increase the risk of lung cancer, but the evidence for an increased risk of heart disease is not yet conclusive.
Thinking about quitting?
As well as reducing your risk of getting a smoking-related illness, there are other benefits to quitting smoking.
General health improves – tiredness and headaches can be linked to smoking.
Your sense of taste and smell improve.
Your heart will be less strained and work more efficiently.
Stopping smoking is the single biggest thing you can do to improve your health, but it's a difficult task.
Smokers who are trying to kick their habit may be disappointed to find there's no single quit method that guarantees success.
The weight of evidence suggests that smokers should set a date to stop, and do their best to quit completely from this point.
On average it takes four to five attempts to give up, and there are a number of things that can help willpower.
Nicotine replacement treatment (NRT) in the form of gum, skin patches or nasal spray.
Zyban (bupropion) is a medicine that's licensed to help smoking cessation.
Champix (varenicline): a medicine that mimics the effect of nicotine in the body, and so reduces the urge to smoke and also reduces withdrawal symptoms. Varenicline can double your chance of successfully quitting
Behaviour modification programmes.
Alternative therapies such as acupuncture and hypnosis.
Research shows that people who take part in a full 'quit smoking' programme, including behavioural therapies and medication, may increase their chance of successfully quitting from about 3 per cent on willpower alone to over 30 per cent.

AML GENETICS

Posted by Doctor Healthy at 11:26 PM |

For such a complex and often treatment-refractory cancer, acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has a comparatively modest genetic makeup, according to investigators in the Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network.

Foraging into the genomes of both normal and cancerous cells in adults with AML, they have revealed what lead investigator Timothy J. Ley, MD, calls the cancer's "genetic playbook," a finding that could help in the development of better risk models and, ideally, therapies better targeted to each patient's disease subtype.

The report is published online May 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

By comparing genomes from normal skin with genomes from the malignant cells of 200 adults with de novo AML, Dr. Ley, from the Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and colleagues found that the AML genomes have, on average, only 13 mutations. Other types of adult cancers that have been sequenced have hundreds of mutations.

Nearly all AML samples tested had at least 1 nonsynonymous mutation — that is, a mutation that is likely to be significant in the development of de novo AML.

"This dataset will provide a framework for future studies that pertain to the molecular classification of patients with AML. The identification of many potentially important relationships among recurrently mutated AML genes and pathways provides a comprehensive foundation for an understanding of the genetic rules of pathogenesis," they write.

"Giving Great Insights"

The investigators found nonsynonymous mutations in each of 9 different gene categories, including mutations in signaling genes (found in 59% of all samples), genes related to DNA methylation (44%), chromatin-modifying genes (30%), and NPM1, the gene encoding nucleophosmin, which is overexpressed, underexpressed, rearranged, or deleted in several types of cancer (27%).

Although chromosomal deletions, segment repeats, and other abnormalities found in some patients with AML are important for diagnosis and risk stratification, about half of all patients with AML have normal karyotypes. Some patients in this intermediate-risk cytogenetic category respond well to consolidation chemotherapy, whereas others do poorly. Identifying which patients might benefit from which therapy has been challenging, so deeper analysis of the genetic and epigenetic basis of AML is needed, the investigators write.

"This is the largest genome-wide analysis of AML ever performed, and it gives us great insight into not only what's going on in this intermediate-risk group, but also in the more complex karyotypes," John F. DiPersio, MD, PhD, who is one of the study investigators, told Medscape Medical News.

Uncomplicated, Yet Intricate

The findings suggest that AML is a "curiously uncomplicated malignancy.... It's associated with a very limited number of mutations, compared with things like lung cancer or melanoma, so there's a possibility that we may figure out what the drivers are, how this disease functions," said Dr. DiPersio, who is chief of the division of oncology at the Washington University School of Medicine.

"This lack of complexity is relative, however," writes David P. Steensma, MD, from the division of hematologic malignancies at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, in an accompanying editorial.

"The clonal architecture of AML is dazzlingly intricate, especially in cases arising from the myelodysplastic syndromes, with some subclones becoming extinct over time, and others achieving dominance, unpredictably," he writes.

The investigators performed whole-genome sequencing of primary tumor and matched skin samples from 50 patients with de novo AML, and exome capture and sequencing of paired samples from another 150 patients. The study involved 108 men and 92 women; mean age at study entry was 55 years.

The most frequently occurring mutations were in NPM1 (in 27% of samples), FLT3 (28%), DNMT3A(26%), IDH1/IDH2 (20%), NRAS or KRAS (12%), and RUNX1 (10%).

Mutations in FLT3, DNMT3A, and NPM1 were more frequently grouped together than would be predicted statistically, and these genes were found less frequently in association with transcription-factor fusions than would otherwise be expected, the investigators report.

"This observation, combined with the strong association between samples having concurrent mutations in NPM1, FLT3, and DNMT3A and distinct clusters in messenger RNA, microRNA, and DNA methylation, suggests that samples with mutations in all 3 genes represent a novel subtype of AML," they write.

Secondary AML a Different Disease

Dr. DiPersio cautioned that the study focused specifically on de novo AML, and should not be used to draw conclusions about treatment-related, or secondary, AML.

"Treatment-related AML is probably a different disease, at least in part; it may be substantially different. The lesson we learned is don't assume that treatment-related AML is exactly like de novo AML," he explained.

Genomic studies of treatment-related AML are in progress, and are likely to reveal "substantial and striking" differences between disease types," he said.

In his editorial, Dr. Steensma contends that most AML secrets have been laid bare.

"It is likely that all the common, recurrent genetic lesions in AML — the molecular equivalent of major causes of death, such as stroke and heart disease — are now described. In individual cases, rare genetic events may occur, akin to uncommon causes of death, such as falling down a well or being struck by space debris," he writes.