Tag Archives: may

More kids have autism than thought: U.S. study

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More kids have autism than thought: U.S. study

You may have heard the oft-quoted statistic that autism affects 1 in 150 US children. Turns out it’s more like 1 in 91 — and about 1 in 58 boys, according to new figures released Sunday.

That’s an estimated 673,000 US children — or approximately 1 percent of all U.S. kids, the researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, and Harvard Medical School, Boston report in the journal Pediatrics.

Bob Wright, co-founder of the autism advocacy group Autism Speaks, told Reuters Health he’s not at all surprised by the new figures. “We’ve been screaming about the numbers going up; now there is a relatively complete recognition of it.”

“The statistical aspect of autism is just staggering,” he said, and not enough is being done about it. “If we had 1 in 58 boys getting swine flu, the country would be crazy,” Wright said.

Autism is a brain disorder characterized by problems with social interaction, repetitive behavior and other symptoms. People with a mild version called Asperger’s syndrome usually function relatively well in society, although they have problems relating to others. People with the most extreme symptoms may be unable to speak and may also suffer severe mental illness and retardation.

No one knows what causes autism — it’s generally thought to have genetic and environmental triggers — and there is currently no good treatment.

Autism is “an urgent public health concern,” Dr. Ileana Arias, deputy director of CDC, told reporters on a conference call Friday ahead of public release of the data.

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Researchers find prostate cancer stem cell

in.reuters.com

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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Infections may speed Alzheimer’s memory loss

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Infections may speed Alzheimer’s memory loss

Catching a cold or the flu could speed memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s disease, researchers reported Tuesday.

In a study of patients with mild to severe Alzheimer’s disease, they found that people who suffered acute or chronic infections, or even bumps and bruises from a fall, were much more likely to have high blood levels of a protein involved in inflammation and also experienced faster memory loss than people who did not have infections and who had low levels of this protein.

It’s possible that finding a way to reduce inflammation in the body “could be beneficial for people with Alzheimer’s disease,” study chief Dr. Clive Holmes, from the University of Southampton, UK, said in a prepared statement.

Over about 6 months, Holmes and colleagues measured the cognitive abilities and blood levels the inflammatory protein TNF-alpha of 222 people with Alzheimer’s disease. They also interviewed each subject’s main caregiver several times during the study.

During follow up, roughly half of the study subjects experienced a sudden infection or injury that led to inflammation, and a spike in TNF-alpha levels. These people, the researchers found, experienced memory loss that was at twice the rate of those who did not have infections or injuries.

People who had high levels of TNF-alpha in their blood at the beginning of the study, a sign of chronic, ongoing inflammation, had memory loss at four times the rate of those with low levels of the protein at the start of the study.

By contrast, subjects with low levels of TNF-alpha throughout the study showed no decline in brain function, the report indicates.

“One might guess that people with a more rapid rate of cognitive decline are more susceptible to infections or injury, but we found no evidence to suggest that people with more severe dementia were more likely to have infections or injuries at the beginning of the study,” Holmes noted in a prepared statement.

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