Health

I could be wrong, but I’d venture to guess there is more nonsense and misinformation about the flu vaccine than any other vaccine out there. Perhaps it’s because it’s a once-a-year vaccine, so that cyclical nature brings out new myths each year. Or maybe it’s because it’s for an illness that many people have had, even more than once, and survived, so they mistakenly assume a vaccine is unnecessary. Whatever the reasons, I’ve decided a comprehensive post addressing every myth I’ve been able to find is long overdue. I plan to update this post as necessary, and I’ll likely republish it each year as a reference — via Red Wine & Apple Sauce

Editors of journals published by the BMJ Group will no longer consider publishing research that is partly or wholly funded by the tobacco industry, the journals have said in an editorial published this week.

Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than five million deaths every year, and current trends show that it will cause more than eight million deaths annually by the year 2030.

Editor-in-chief of BMJ Open Trish Groves said editors of the BMJ, BMJ Open, Heart, and Thorax could no longer ignore the growing body of evidence — from the tobacco industry’s released internal documents — that the industry continues to actively play down the risks of its products.

What’s worse is that scientific journals have published potentially biased studies that were funded by industry, often without realising that research funding bodies that sounded independent and academic were largely paid for by industry.

Other journals that have previously introduced such bans include PLOS Medicine in 2010 and the journals published by The American Thoracic Society in 1995 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Scientists have hailed an historic turning point in the search for a medicine that could beat Alzheimer’s disease, after a drug-like compound was used to halt brain cell death in mice for the first time.

Although the prospect of a pill for Alzheimer’s remains a long way off, the landmark British study provides a major new pathway for future drug treatments.

The compound works by blocking a faulty signal in brains affected by neurodegenerative diseases, which shuts down the production of essential proteins, leading to brain cells being unprotected and dying off.

It was tested in mice with prion disease — the best animal model of human neurodegenerative disorders – but scientists said they were confident the same principles would apply in a human brain with debilitating brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

The study, published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, was carried out at the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Toxicology Unit at the University of Leicester — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Ballet dancers develop differences in their brain structures to allow them to perform pirouettes without feeling dizzy, a study has found.

A team from Imperial College London said dancers appear to suppress signals from the inner ear to the brain.

Dancers traditionally use a technique called spotting, which minimises head movement.

The researchers say their findings may help patients who experience chronic dizziness — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Cancer Centre at Duke University has the largest experience on the East Coast with my sort of tumour, so I went there for further consultation and treatment.

As doctors there examined me, it was obvious that my tumour had already grown again; in fact, it had quadrupled in size since my initial chemo and radiation. I was offered several treatments and experimental protocols, one of which involved implanting a modified polio virus into my brain. (This had been very successful in treating GBMs in mice.) Duke researchers had been working on this for 10 years and had just received permission from the FDA to treat 10 patients, but for only one a month. (A Duke press release last May explained that the treatment was designed to capitalize on the discovery that cancer cells have an abundance of receptors that work like magnets in drawing the polio virus, which then infects and kills the cells. The investigational therapy… uses an engineered form of the virus that is lethal to cancer cells, while harmless to normal cells. The therapy is infused directly into a patient’s tumour. The virus-based therapy also triggers the body’s immune system to attack the infected tumour cells) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

This medical case may give a whole new meaning to the phrase beer gut.

A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyser test. And sure enough, the man’s blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol that day.

He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime, says , the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyser.

Other medical professionals chalked up the man’s problem to closet drinking. But Cordell and Dr Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

So the team searched the man’s belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer’s yeast in his gut.

That’s right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man’s intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery — via redwolf.newsvine.com

An experimental vaccine implant to treat skin cancer has begun early trials in humans, as part of a growing effort to train the immune system to fight tumours.

The approach, which was shown to work in lab mice in 2009, involves placing a fingernail-sized sponge under the skin, where it reprograms a patient’s immune cells to find cancerous melanoma cells and kill them.

It is rare to get a new technology tested in the laboratory and moved into human clinical trials so quickly, said Glenn Dranoff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and part of the research team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University — via redwolf.newsvine.com