Tag Archives: researchers

Doubts on suicide-anti-smoking drug Chantix link

Doubts on suicide-anti-smoking drug Chantix link

Despite earlier health agency warnings, there is no strong evidence that the anti-smoking drug Chantix raises the risk of suicidal thoughts or depression compared to other stop-smoking products, researchers reported Thursday in the British Medical Journal.

Back in July of this year, U.S. health officials ordered strong “black box” warnings be added to Chantix (also called varenicline) as well as anti-smoking drug Zyban, following more than five thousand reports of depression, hostility and other behavioral changes possibly associated with use of these drugs.

“There have been recent concerns that varenicline, a relatively new smoking cessation product, may increase the risk of suicidal behavior and suicide,” study co-author Dr. David Gunnell of the University of Bristol, UK, explained in an email to Reuters Health.

“We found no clear evidence of an increased risk of self-harm or depression associated with varenicline,” he said.

The findings stem from data on more than 80,660 would-be quitters in the UK who used different smoking cessation products between September 2006 and May 2008.

A total of 63,265 of these individuals used nicotine replacement products, 10,973 used Chantix, and 6,422 used Zyban, an antidepressant also called bupropion, which has been found to help smokers quit.

When researchers looked at medical records, they didn’t find any evidence of an increased risk of serious mental health problems (i.e., self-harm, suicidal thoughts or depression) while they were using these products and during the three months after the last prescription was filled.

Gunnell cautioned, however, that based on the size of the study, it’s still possible that Chantix does increase the risk of suicide – or even decrease it.

“Other studies should be undertaken to provide further evidence on this issue,” he concluded.

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Smoking in pregnancy risks psychotic children

Smoking in pregnancy risks psychotic children

Mothers who smoke during pregnancy put their children at greater risk of developing psychotic symptoms as teenagers, British scientists said on Thursday.

Researchers from four British universities studied 6,356 12-year-olds and interviewed them for psychotic-like symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions. Around 19 percent had mothers who smoked during pregnancy.

Just over 11 percent, or 734 of the total group, had suspected or definite symptoms of psychosis.

Many previous studies have shown cigarettes can harm the fetuses of mothers who smoke while pregnant. The risks include causing babies to be born smaller and increasing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome or heart defects.

Stanley Zammit, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine who led the study, said the more the mothers smoked, the more likely their children were to have psychotic symptoms.

“We can estimate that about 20 percent of adolescents in this cohort would not have developed psychotic symptoms if their mothers had not smoked,” he said.

Despite countless studies flagging up the risks to babies, it is estimated that between 15 and 20 percent of women in Britain smoke during pregnancy.

The researchers also found drinking during pregnancy was associated with increased psychotic symptoms, but only in children whose mothers had drunk more than 21 units of alcohol a week in early pregnancy.

The reasons for the link between maternal smoking and psychotic symptoms are not clear, but Zammit and colleagues suggested that exposure to tobacco in the womb might affect a child’s impulsivity, attention or cognition.

They said more research was needed to investigate how exposure to tobacco in the womb affected children’s brains.

Only a few mothers in the study, which was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, said they had smoked cannabis during pregnancy, and this was not found to have any significant link with psychotic symptoms.

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Researchers find prostate cancer stem cell

Researchers find prostate cancer stem cell

Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are cancer cells (found within tumors or hematological cancers) that possess characteristics associated with normal stem cells, specifically the ability to give rise to all cell types found in a particular cancer sample. CSCs are therefore tumorigenic (tumor-forming), perhaps in contrast to other non-tumorigenic cancer cells. CSCs may generate tumors through the stem cell processes of self-renewal and differentiation into multiple cell types. Such cells are proposed to persist in tumors as a distinct population and cause relapse and metastasis by giving rise to new tumors. Therefore, development of specific therapies targeted at CSCs holds hope for improvement of survival and quality of life of cancer patients, especially for sufferers of metastatic disease.

Existing cancer treatments have mostly been developed based on animal models, where therapies able to promote tumor shrinkage were deemed effective. However, animals could not provide a complete model of human disease. In particular, in mice, whose life spans do not exceed two years, tumor relapse is exceptionally difficult to study.

The efficacy of cancer treatments is, in the initial stages of testing, often measured by the ablation fraction of tumor mass (fractional kill). As CSCs would form a very small proportion of the tumor, this may not necessarily select for drugs that act specifically on the stem cells. The theory suggests that conventional chemotherapies kill differentiated or differentiating cells, which form the bulk of the tumor but are unable to generate new cells. A population of CSCs, which gave rise to it, could remain untouched and cause a relapse of the disease.

Researchers have found a stem cell, a kind of master cell, that may cause at least some types of prostate cancer.

Their findings are only experimental — the stem cells were found in mice — but could explain at least some types of prostate cancer and eventually offer new ways to treat it, they reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The findings also show a potential new source for prostate tumors — so-called luminal cells, which secrete various compounds used in the prostate.

“The role of stem cells in the development of prostate cancer has been a focus of speculation for many years,” Dr. Helen Rippon of Britain’s Prostate Cancer Charity said in a statement.

“Importantly, this new stem cell does not rely on androgens — the male sex hormones that control prostate growth — to survive and grow. This may give a clue as to why prostate cancer often becomes resistant to treatments designed to regulate these androgens in the later stages of the disease,” added Rippon, who was not involved in the research.

“This improved knowledge will also be a step forward in learning how we might help to prevent the disease from developing in men in the first place.”

Michael Shen of Columbia University Medical Center and colleagues named the new stem cells CARNs, for castration-resistant Nkx3.1-expressing cells.

They normally regenerate part of the tissue that lines the inside of the gland, which produces semen. But the cells can also form tumors if certain genes meant to stop out-of-control growth get turned off.

Shen said researchers had believed that tumors arise from a different layer of cells in the prostate, called basal cells.

“Previous research suggested that prostate cancer originates from basal stem cells, and that during cancer formation these cells differentiate into luminal cells,” Shen said in a statement. “Instead, CARNs may represent a luminal origin for prostate cancer.”

Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men worldwide after lung cancer, killing 254,000 men a year globally.

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